


Flight

by Losyark



Series: Tobogganing [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, F/M, Family, Gen, Kidfic, aaaaaangst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losyark/pseuds/Losyark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has somehow wormed his way under Rodney’s skin and into his heart, has complete and utter faith in Rodney, relies on Rodney, is vulnerable and needs Rodney’s protection and trusts Rodney to do it right. That scares the ever loving shit out of Rodney, because he’s never been any good about taking care of anyone but himself, and as his bulging little pudge belly and hypertension betray, he’s not even all that good at that. But taking care of John somehow makes him a better human being, makes Rodney want to try harder, to be the person that John thinks he is, to not let the trust and reliance be betrayed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

Johnny Sheppard was born when he was ten years old. Or, one hundred and fifty seven years old, depending on how you wanted to count it. Rodney isn’t sure which way he prefers it – ten seems too young for all that John has seen and done, but one hundred and fifty seven just reminded Rodney that John used to be dead and that… wasn’t pleasant.

John has been in a corporeal body for ten minutes when he eats his first slice of leftover Meat Lovers pizza, has his first diet soda, burps a spectacular ten out of ten, and is made to brush his teeth for the first time by Carson, who worries that loading all that junk into him right away might have adverse affects on a body that has been created pristine and perfect.

Rodney supposes it was a legitimate concern; it’s not like John’s new clone body has picked up any defects from a birth mother, but it probably hasn’t picked up any antibodies or the kind of stuff, the good stuff, that mom’s pass on to babies either.

They’re standing in the hallway outside of Rodney’s bathroom. John is inside, figuring out his own body’s plumbing for the first time, washing his hands carefully with soap, just like Rodney showed him how to do, in order to make sure all the germs were killed.

Rodney waits until the door shuts before he mentions it to Carson, a quick, “Um, his immune system… colds… is he going to die from…?” and Carson gives him a dirty look.

“Duh, Rodney,” he says, the teenager-ish sentiment sounding funny in his accent. “Where do you think I got my medical degree, off the back of a cereal box?”

Rodney flinches, because those are the exact words he’s fired at Carson like weapons an hour ago when John Sheppard’s ghost had sunk into the clone flesh and not moved, not _breathed_ for five minutes straight.

“Carson, I--” he starts, but apologizing is irritating, and worse, it’s _hard_ , but he means it, he really does, so he’s relieved that he doesn’t have to say it; Carson reads it in his eyes and sighs.

“It’s okay, Rodney; I wouldna be your friend if I couldna tell when you’re yelling just to relieve stress. You didnae mean it.”

Rodney sighs and slumps, leaning one broad shoulder against the wall. “Thanks, Carson. I was just… I mean, I can’t imagine how he’s going to react when he gets his first flu. He _died_ from a cold, and I just… I don’t know how I’m going to handle it when he gets another one, he’s going to _flip out._..”

“Rodney, John was constructed with Asguard technology. I doubt that he’ll ever get another cold ever again.” Carson licks his lips once and adds, “I made sure of it.”

And Rodney knows what that means, knows that Carson thought of it way before Rodney did, and made sure that it wasn’t a trauma John would ever have to go through again. 

Still, Rodney’s wound up. John has somehow wormed his way under Rodney’s skin and into his heart, has complete and utter faith in Rodney, relies on Rodney, is vulnerable and needs Rodney’s protection and trusts Rodney to do it right. That scares the ever loving _shit_ out of Rodney, because he’s never been any good about taking care of anyone but himself, and as his bulging little pudge belly and hypertension betray, he’s not even all that good at that. But taking care of John somehow makes him a better human being, makes Rodney want to _try harder_ , to be the person that John thinks he is, to not let the trust and reliance be betrayed.

It almost makes Rodney want to call his sister. Surely the brat she dropped out of school for has to have been born by now, right? How old would it be? Six months? A year? Rodney didn’t know. They’d fought fiercely right before he’d been shipped to Siberia, his anger at the SGC’s betrayal and the obvious preference for stupid wrong Sam Carter (and that wasn’t right, that he should see hate flashing in her pretty blue eyes, when she was supposed to recognize him for his genius, love him for his quirky smiles and charming insults, what had gone wrong?) transferred onto his sister.

Just another dumb blonde wasting her talent with stupid decisions.

They hadn’t spoken since, but now that Rodney had John, he thought he maybe understood, how it could be okay to give up something that made you content but perhaps not happy, for something that you love a lot.

Huh.

And apparently Rodney McKay loves John Sheppard. Yeah, well, like _that_ was a huge surprise. He’s already sunk money and months into developing technology just to give John the agency of speech back. He’s helped his best friend grow an icky, squishy clone so the kid could give back the life John had been denied by one stupid case of the sniffles and an ATA gene so strong that it had forcefully half Acended him like a sort of defunct ejector seat.

Rodney looks back up at Carson, who is chewing worriedly on his bottom lip, mistaking Rodney’s contemplative silence for concern.

“Rodney, I worked on Dolly,” Carson blurts, “I’ve cloned mice and stem cells and I’ve been working on developing Asguard cloning techniques in order to duplicate the ATA gene for non-carriers. I know enough to make sure John’s immune system would be ready to fend off anything this world – or any other – could throw at him.”

  _This world – or any other_.

Rodney feels his stomach drop, his heart go cold in his chest.

“No,” Rodney says. “You’re not taking my son off-world.” The declaration startles both men, but Rodney crosses his arms over his chest and lifts his chin and tries to make it look like he totally meant to say what he just did.

Son. Huh.

Carson’s eyes go wide first, and his lips white, and then a slow red blush flags across his nose. “I think, Rodney, that you’ll find that John is _my_ son, according to the birth certificate that I had the SGC fake up.”

Rodney swallows hard. He hadn’t thought about that stuff: birth certificates and legal documentation, years of false immunization records and passports and school reports. Rodney suddenly wonders if they made John a straight As student, or the class clown, or an athletic marvel who flunks his math tests. It’s galling. The idea that the SGC gets to say who John is, instead of letting John – amazing, incredible, smart, honest, trusting John – _show_ them. Instead of letting John define himself for himself.

He hates the SGC suddenly. He hates them more than he did when they told him to go fix the problem with the StarGate and then shipped him to Sibera for knowing exactly what had to be done, labeled him callous and useless, defined him forever with his colleagues as acerbic and not worth keeping on any team, tore him away from his chance to prove himself for himself, to make up for his mistakes. He hates that he had to go back to them to give John the life he deserved, away from a half-ascended limbo, hates that he owes them for the boy. 

Hates that the SGC technically owns John.

“The SGC can’t have him,” Rodney says. “ _You_ can’t have him.”

Carson, apparently, has been following his train of thought, because he doesn’t even blink when he says, “That’s not your choice, Rodney. He was cloned using SGC resources. And you quit.”

Rodney’s hands tighten into fists, and he can’t believe they’re even having this argument. “He’s been cooped up in this goddamned house for centuries! You can’t just lock him up under that fucking mountain!”

“Rodney--”

“John deserves… he deserves a normal life, okay? He deserves mud pies and scraped knees and fighting on the playground!” And God, since when was Rodney McKay so fucking idealistic?

“Rodney, you have to understand, we were only granted permission to go forward with this because of the strength of John’s ATA gene--”

And no. Just no. That’s it. That’s enough.

Rodney pulls himself up to his full height, hands stiff and shoulders tight, vibrating, absolutely vibrating with fury. “John Sheppard will not be your _fucking Atlantis lightswitch_.”

Carson matches him glare for glare. “You dunnae have a say.”

The door creaks back and a dark, messy head pokes out between the crack. “Rodney?” John says softly, and his hazel eyes are wide and his skin is white. He doesn’t understand why they’re angry at each other, just that they are, and that it’s about him, and Rodney feels like an _asshole_.

“C’mon, John,” he says, “Let’s get you into your new PJs and into bed.” He holds out his hand and John takes it, that same innocent trust in his eyes and Rodney feels guilt for what he’s about to do, swift and painful, boot him in the gut.

Carson is supposed to be his best friend.

                                                *        *        *

Rodney leaves John to get himself into his own pajamas. He tucks John into bed, ignoring John’s protests that he doesn’t _like_ sleeping any more, and starts telling him some bedtime stories that closely resemble Star Trek episodes.

Rodney keeps talking until he hears Carson go into his own room, then starts tossing all the carefully folded little boy clothing with the price tags still attached into a battered old backpack. He tiptoes over to his own room, packs a hasty similar bag, whipping through his lab dead silent to transfer all his data and blueprints onto an external hard drive and set a worm loose on the machines he leaves behind.

When Rodney goes back upstairs, he can hear Carson talking on the phone with someone, using lots of medical jargon.

Rodney knows he has no time to loose.

Rodney bundles John up into a brand new pair of boots and a coat, and carries the boy on his hip, clutching both the bags in his other hand, avoiding the squeaky stairs that John points out.

John’s eyes are wide and bright, and he whispers into Rodney’s ear as they tiptoe down the hall, “Are we playing a trick on Carson?”

“Yes,” Rodney says, and he feels like utter scum. “Yes, we are.”

 

                                                *        *        *

They drive north.

Rodney’s pretty certain that they’ll make the Detroit/Windsor border by dawn, it should only take a few hours, but once they’re in Canada, he has no idea where to go. They swing through a drive through at about midnight for chicken fingers and burgers, and Rodney tells John to curl up under the blankets in the wheel well and pretend really hard to be another backpack.

Rodney pays in cash, with a hat pulled low on his head, John starts giggling just as they pull out of the drive-thru, almost giving the game away. Rodney feels paranoid, but there could be an APB out on them already, and he’s not taking any more chances than he has to.

They stop on the side of the road just outside of Detroit so both the boys can relieve the pressure on their bladders, and when they climb back into the clunky car, John asks, “Rodney? Where are we going?”

“To visit… to visit my sister,” Rodney says. Yes, Toronto is a big enough city to hide in for a while. Jeannie lives in Greek Town off of Danforth Ave, right near all the subway lines and the big tourist areas. Easy to get lost in.

“Okay,” John says, completely accepting. “What about Carson?”

“Carson had work to do,” Rodney lies.

“Okay,” John says again. Rodney puts on his seatbelt and John leans down out of the car and picks a handful of grass. He crushes it in his fist and holds it up to his face.

“What are you doing?” Rodney asks as he starts the ignition.

“This is the first time I’ve touched grass since I died,” John says, and it’s just so matter-of-fact that it breaks Rodney’s heart. John’s first day alive shouldn’t be spent on the run trapped in a car. John isn’t complaining, but Rodney still feels horrible.

Rodney puts the car into gear and the pull back onto the lonely stretch of early morning highway, pointing towards Canada.

They hit the border within the half hour, and Rodney can feel his pulse skyrocket, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Surely they must have stopped up the border, surely there’s SGC personnel waiting for them, their faces on bulletins, Marines with guns and dogs searching every car.

Instead a sleepy guard asks Rodney’s name, his place of birth, his business in the USA. Rodney says, “Meredith Miller, Vancouver, taking my son to see a Red Wings game.”

The guard is supposed to ask for papers, a passport, a birth certificate for everyone in the car, but he is half awake and doesn’t care. He waves them through with just a cursory glance at John. 

“Looks like his Mom?” the guard asks, noting the dark hair and hazel eyes, comparing them against Rodney’s sandy blonde and bright blue.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Rodney says, and wishes the guard a good night, and drives away with his heart hammering on the back of his tongue.

John is quiet for a little while, and then he says, “Rodney. You lied to him.”

“Yes,” Rodney says.

“Why?”

“Because… because if they… if they knew who you were, John, if they knew that you used to be a… a ghost… then they would, um,” and he trails off, because he doesn’t know how much to admit.

“They’d be scared,” John supplies with an understanding nod. “I’d be scared of ghosts, too,” he admits, “if I hadn’t been one.”

“Yeah,” Rodney says. “Me too.”

                                                *        *        *

John nods off into a fitful sleep around dawn, and Rodney is thankful that the kid is finally conked out. They’re well out of Windsor and a good way up the 401 highway before John jerks awake, screaming.

Rodney is startled so badly that he veers into the lane beside theirs, nearly side swiping a little green Honda. The Honda slows abruptly and lays on the horn and Rodney doesn’t even have the energy to wave the guy the finger because John’s still screaming at the top of his lungs.

Rodney signals and checks the mirror carefully and pulls off the highway into a carpool parking lot. He slams the car into park, whips off his seatbelt, and reaches across the stick shift to wrap John in his arms, to rock him slowly, to whisper, “It’s okay, John, it’s just a bad dream, it’s just a dream.”

 

John wakes up sobbing. His tears are hot against Rodney’s neck and his heart is beating far too fast against Rodney’s ribcage and he curls his fingers in Rodney’s shirt and whines his name over and over and over.

“I’m here, it’s okay,” Rodney says, wishing that it all really was okay.

“Rodney,” John whimpers.

“Yeah?”

“My Mother and Father are dead.”

Rodney’s heart clenches. “Yeah they are,” he says. “Mine, too.”

“I used to be dead,” John says.

“Not really,” Rodney says, just to be contrary, but it feels pathetic even in his own ears. “Just a little bit.”

John sniffles loudly. “I don’t like sleeping.”

“It’ll get better,” Rodney promises. “It will. When you get more practice.”

“If I go to sleep again… will I die?”

Rodney pulls back, grabs John’s shoulder with one hand and his chin with the other and looks him directly in the eye. “No,” he says. “You will wake up alive every single time, I promise.”

John sniffles again and nods and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

“Rodney?” he asks.

“Yeah, John?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me too,” Rodney says. “Want an Egg McMuffin?”

John nods and slumps back in his seat, exhausted and pale and lips trembling, the perfect portrait of childish misery. He doesn’t even know what an Egg McMuffin is. Rodney does up his own seatbelt and switches back into drive and carefully merges back onto the highway, eyes open for a rest stop sign.

“Rodney?” John says after a quiet moment.

“Yeah?”

“We forgot my toboggan.”

Rodney closes his eyes, for just a second, and wishes that this was easy.

                                                *        *        *

By noon they’ve had their McMuffins and Rodney’s starting to think about some Tim Hortons coffee and sandwiches when John rolls down the window and sticks his head out of it.

“John!” Rodney yelps, but the kid still has his seatbelt on, so Rodney doesn’t reach out and tug him back.                                       

“What’s that?” John asks, pointing up out of the car window at a black shadow cutting across the sky. His grin is wide, like a puppy whose muzzle has been blown back by the wind that the motion of the car makes, and his silly cowlicks are flattened for once, defeated by the breeze.

Rodney cranes his head over the steering wheel to look. “It’s a plane, John, you’ve seen them on TV before.”

“Not that shape,” John says. He pulls his head back inside the car and holds up his little fingers to mimic the shape of a triangle. “It’s like this.”

“Then it’s a jet plane,” Rodney says. He tries not to think about the Air Force, or the nearby Camp Borden, or military police. “They go really fast.”

John looks back at the plane, hazel eyes sparkling with joy. “I’m going to fly planes one day, Rodney,” he says. “Maybe I’ll join the Air Force, like Carson’s friends at the SGC, or like Sam Carter.”

 _Not if I can help it_ , Rodney thinks, but doesn’t say.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Rodney feels ridiculous.

He doesn’t even know if Jeannie’s home, but here he is, standing on her front door step with a sleepy child in one arm and their bags in the other. Rodney had ditched the car in a sketchy parking lot beside a far away subway station, deliberately leaving it unlocked and the keys in the ignition. He’d taken everything out of the glove compartment, but left the McDonald’s wrappers.

Wrangling an exhausted boy who had grown up in 1850 onto the subways had been more of a challenge than he had anticipated, John startling back from teh edge of the platform so violently that Rodney had to drag him onto the car when the doors opened. Rodney is about five minutes away from throwing his own damn temper tantrum, but they were finally here.

He can’t get his fingers at the door bell so he has to instruct John to press it. The boy stabs the button petulantly, but when he realizes that it causes a low sound to relay into the house, he smiles softly and jams it twice more.

“Whoa, whoa,” Rodney says, twisting his body away from the door. “Once is enough.”

John immediately sinks back down into a sulk, and Rodney follows him right down into it. He’s tired, he’d been driving for ten hours, he's caffine deprived, and he’s starving. He wants a shower and a bed and eight hours alone, but he knows he isn’t going to get it, at least not until he’s run the gauntlet with his sister first.

If she's even here.

“Goddamnit!” he says and kicks the screen door hard. “You’re a woman with a newborn! You can’t be out!”

“Hold your horses!” Jeannie’s voice snarls from the other side of the wooden door, and Rodney blanches. Every instinct inside of him tells him to back away, but he is standing as far back on the top step as he can already, and he isn’t going to risk breaking his own neck, or John’s. 

Besides, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Jeannie yanks open the wooden door and says, “I just got Madison to bed so this better be… Meredith?”

She stops in the doorway, eyes wide and startled and cutting from his face to John’s and back again.

“You… I… what?”

“Don’t slam the door, Jeannie,” Rodney says hastily.

“What the hell…” Jeannie starts, but looks at John again, slumped and miserable, and opens the screen door. “In, in,” she says brusquely, somehow relieving him of both bags and closing the doors at the same time. 

Rodney finds himself ushered into a living room with pale carpeting and a low table scattered with toys. There is a baby, small and pink and pretty wonderfully small, asleep in a little carrier bassinet on a brown sofa.

“Oh,” Rodney says, stopping at the entrance to the room and staring at the baby.

Madison. Madison… Miller.

His niece or nephew?

Their family really has to get out of this habit of androgynous naming.

 

“Is it, um… boy or girl?” he asks stupidly.

“Girl,” Jeannie says, sweeping around him to set his bags down beside the dark wooded piano against the wall. 

“My piano,” Rodney says, reaching out with his free hand to run careful fingers over the scrollwork on the lid. “I thought Dad sold it.”

“I bought it back,” Jeannie says brusquely. “What’s going on Mer? I haven’t heard from you in a year – a year- and suddenly you just show up on my door step with a… a…”

She makes a hopeless gesture at John.

“This is John,” Rodney says. “John, this is my sister, Aunt Jeannie.”

Jeannie nearly swallows her teeth. “A-aunt?” she repeats, and Rodney might find this hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. He sets John down on his own feet, and John leans into his legs, face buried in the side of his pants. “He’s sleepy,” Rodney says, excusing John’s shyness.

“No, that’s fine, I…” Jeannie says, and stops. She crouches down beside John, reaches out and runs one hand through the mass of dark springy cowlicks at the back. “Hello, John,” she says softly. “It’s nice to meet you.”

John sighs into Rodney’s leg, as if this a particularily onerous task, and perhaps for a ten year old it is, but he pulls away and stands up straight and tucks one hand across the small of his back and one across his stomach and executes the most perfect little toy soldier bow. “It is a pleasure to meet you as well, Miss Aunt Jeannie,” he recites. “My name is Johnathan Sheppard.”

Jeannie starts back, startled as Rodney is at first at the ceremony, but then it happens – Rodney can pinpoint it – the moment her ovaries explode at John’s inadvertent sweetness.

“What good manners you have,” Jeannie says, her grin absolutely beaming. “I wonder who you got those from,” she adds, giving Rodney the fisheye, making it clear she knows it wasn’t from him.

“My Mother,” John says. Then, social performance over, he goes back to sulking into Rodney’s legs.

“Meredith, what--?” Jeannie starts, but Rodney holds up his hand and she stops.

“I don’t say this often, so relish it. Jeannie,” Rodney takes a deep breath. “I need your help.”

Jeannie blinks. 

“Oo-kay,” she says.

“Can we stay? Just for a little while? Until… until things get sorted out?”

Jeannie shakes her head once, pulling herself out of a shocked haze, and says, “Yes, of course Mer. Obviously. Duh.”

Rodney slumps, all the tension sliding out of his shoulders, a weight lifted away.

“You look terrible,” she says.

“Gee, thanks. I’ve been driving since last night.”

Jeannie blinks again and says, “I’ll set up the guest room for you. Does your… uh… does your son want his own bed?”

Rodney thrills a little to hear John described as his son. The thrill vanishes when John tightens his grip on Rodney’s legs. “No,” Rodney says, “We’ll share. He’s…” Rodney shrugs. “Nightmares.”

“Okay,” Jeannie says. She stares at them for another second, before snapping herself out of it. “Watch Maddy for a second, I’ll go make the bed.” She wrinkles her nose. “Showers first?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She bustles out of the room, leaving John and him alone with the baby.

Rodney scoops John up onto his hip and John settles his face against Rodney’s neck. His own cheeks are hot, and Rodney resists the urge to check John’s temperature. It’s not a fever; Carson said that John wouldn’t be likely to ever catch another communicable disease again. John’s just tired.

Rodney stifles the surge of guilt that swells up at the thought of Carson, and goes to sit on the sofa beside his niece. Father and uncle in one day. Huh. He peers down at the baby, searching for Jeannie in the button nose, his mother in the puff of her cheeks, himself in the slant of the mouth.

“What’s that?” John asks, peering too.

“That’s Madison Miller,” Rodney says, reveling in the small wash of pride. “That’s my niece.”

“That’s a person?” John asks, genuinely curious. “She’s so small.”

“She’s a baby,” Rodney says. “Of course she’s small.”

“I was never that small,” John says definitely, and Rodney just smiles into John’s shoulder and pats his back and says nothing.

* * *

Jeannie comes back downstairs a few minutes later, stopping at the doorway to enjoy the view of her cranky brother napping beside his son and her daughter. She reaches for the camera on the top of the piano, but Rodney cracks an eyelid and says, “Do it and die.”

She smiles, helps him wrangle John, dozy and unhappy, up the stairs, out of his clothes, and into a shower. At first, Rodney doesn’t know what to do. Should he strip down and get under the spray with John? It makes him feel old and lecherous; of course he has no sexual intent towards John, but he’s also not really John’s father, and he has no idea if John ever saw a naked person besides himself before. Jeannie saves him the trouble by telling Rodney that she’ll take care of John and he should go use the bathroom en suite in her own bedroom.

Rodney escapes gratefully, leaving a cranky sweaty boy to her sister, and goes down the hall, crosses through the bedroom, and strips quickly. He turns on the shower as hot as he can stand and climbs under the spray, cleaning quickly and perfunctorily, having no desire to linger in the place that his little sister and her husband have probably had sex.

Uhg.

When he goes back into the guest room, a big fluffy towel slung around his hips, Jeannie is manipulating John into an oversized tee-shirt that Rodney recognizes as one of his own. John's PJs, the ones they fled in, smell stale and are in need of a wash. Rodney digs around in his own bag for another tee-shirt and some clean boxers, nips into the washroom to don them, and comes back out.

John is saying, “Don’t like sleeping, don’t wanna die,” muttering it under his breath even as Jeannie tries to get him to lie down on the bed.

“Mer,” she says, shooting him a concerned look. They both drop into a barely vocalized whisper. “Die?”

“It’s nothing, it’s… his mother… she fell asleep and didn’t wake up. You know…”

Jeannie nods, like she does know, like Rodney isn’t lying, and slips out of the room quietly with a look that promises lots of cups of coffee and conversations later.

Rodney sits on the bed and rolls under the covers quietly. John is fighting sleep every step of the way, head down on the pillow, eyelids puffy and red and heavy.

“It’s okay John,” Rodney says, running his hands down John’s back, pulling the little boy in close, curling his legs up to form a protective cocoon. “I’m here. You’ll wake up alive, I promise,” he says, and rubs his hands up and down John’s bumpy little spine, up and down, up and down, up and down.

 

* * *

Rodney wakes up when he hears the front door open and close. Quiet footsteps speak of a man who’s used to tiptoeing around sleeping children, and for that Rodney’s grateful.

This must be Kaleb Miller, the English Major who seduced Jeannie out of a profitable and illustrious career with distinguished awards and publications, into the realm of breastfeeding and spit up and milk stains. John stirs against his shoulder, wild black hair tickling Rodney’s nose, and he suddenly can’t seem to hate Miller as much as he used to.

Still, he dreads meeting the man. 

Can he get away with just camping up here with John until tomorrow morning when Kaleb leaves for work? Rodney’s stomach rumbles and answers for him.

The grumble is loud enough that John, sleeping against him, startles awake.

For a second the boy’s eyes are wide and round, terror in his face, but then he realizes what the sound was and giggles. “Rodney has a bear in his stomach,” he says, grinning. 

Then John’s stomach makes a similar rumble, and they both grin. “Yours is a wolverine,” Rodney says. “Time to get up.”

They shrug into clean pants and sweaters, and Rodney has to rip the tags off of John’s clothes and lets John open the new package of tiny tighty whiteies himself. It’s surreal, to see underwear that small.

Rodney gives his own hair a swipe with the palm of his hand – it’s so short and thinning enough now that he doesn’t need a comb, even if he had fallen asleep on wet hair. John’s is as hopeless now as it ever was before, so Rodney doesn’t even bother looking for a brush.

Satisfied, he heads for the door. John seizes his hand, shy again, and Rodney marvels at the small warm fingers intertwined with his own. He’d gotten so used to John being incorporeal, being nothing more than a cold air pocket, he still can’t quite seem to resolve John Sheppard with warmalivehere. Rodney’s forgotten that John’s shy, was shy with him at first, and later with Carson.

Again the wave of guilt that needs a vicious stomping down.

Rodney and John make their way down the stairs and back to the living room where a tall, weedy man with a ridiculous poof of dark hair is holding Madison above his head and blowing raspberries on her little tummy. Madison is kicking her feet and squealing happily, so Rodney supposes she likes it.

Rodney clears his throat, and Kaleb looks around his daughter to smile at him. “You must be Meredith,” he says. “And John.”

“It’s Rodney, actually,” Rodney corrects. “And you must be Kaleb.”

“Who’s Kaleb?” John asks.

“Uncle Kaleb,” Rodney says.

“Oh,” John says, and performs the same little perfect bow and introduction.

“Wow,” Kaleb says, dropping Madison down onto his shoulder, where he snugs her up tight against his own neck. “Jeannie said he was well mannered.”

“It’s all his mother’s doing, I assure you,” Rodney snaps, because he resents the idea that Jeannie has been telling Kaleb that he’s a mannerless buffoon. Not that Jeannie doesn’t have the right – it was a pretty nasty fight they had the last time he was here.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” Kaleb says. “Could you?” He hands Madison over to Rodney before Rodney can figure out what it is that Kaleb wants, and Rodney clutches her instinctively against his chest, one hand under her tennis-ball head, the other under her bubble-diapere butt.

Kaleb shrugs out of his trench coat and hangs it on a hall tree by the door. He picks up a briefcase that was lying haphazard in the middle of the entry way and puts it on the piano bench. Rodney crouches down so John can look into Madison’s face.

They regard each other carefully, John and Madison, and then Madison opens her gummy toothless mouth and lets forth with a belch of approval.

“Was that better than my first one?” John asks with a grin.

Rodney shakes his head, amused. “Eight out of ten. I bet she could do better.”

John reaches out with one finger and touches Madison’s hand. She seizes his finger and brings it up to her mouth and sucks.

“She’s very alive,” John says. “I like touching alive people.”

“Yeah,” Rodney says.

Kaleb is hovering in door, and interrupts softly and says, “Jeannie says dinner’s ready. Spaghetti and marinated tofu balls.”

Rodney straightens and hands Kaleb his daughter and makes a face. “Tofu?” he repeats, aghast.

“What’s tofu?” John asks as they walk into the dining room. “Is it a kind of food?”

“No,” Rodney says, and manfully takes the swat in the back of the head that Jeannie delivers as he walks by her.

* * *

After dinner, Kaleb goes upstairs to mark papers in his office, and John agrees to take care of Madison in the living room, the baby snug in her bassinet and highly entertained by John’s peek-a-boo faces. Jeannie puts on the kettle.

In their house, when their mother wanted to have a serious sit-down, she’d always put the kettle on first. This is how Rodney knows that Jeannie is ready for the full story.

They stare at each other over the kitchen table in silence, Rodney trying not to give away too much with his face – always his downfall, his abysmal poker face – while searching Jeannie’s for any clue of her reaction to this whole mess.

When the kettle whistles, Jeannie gets up, makes a pot of loose leaf tea, brings the pot and two mugs and some milk to the table. Neither of them drink it with sugar.

“Where do I start?” Rodney asks, because he wants to know how far back she wants to go, how much of the old kicking and screaming needs to be dragged out and rehashed. He was never good at this either, this communicating with words thing. Letters, yes, and numbers. Mathematical equations; if people were algebra, then he could speak with them, precise and never open to misinterpretation.

Words left room for reading between the lines and things said that weren’t really said and the frustration of inadequate vocabulary, screwed up grammar.

“An apology would be appropriate, I think,” Jeannie says, and she lifts her chin and waits.

Rodney sighs. “I still think that you shouldn’t have dropped out,” he says. Jeannie is up and out of her chair before he gets to the end of the sentence, but he snakes out a hand and grabs her wrist. “Let me finish.”

She sits back down, but as far back in the chair as she can go, away from him.

“But", he adds, “Madison is beautiful and Kaleb isn’t entirely worthless – he knows who Pythagarus is, at least – and now I kind of sort of … get the whole… you know…” he gestures at the kids in the living room, blowing spit bubbles at each other, “the thing.”

“The ‘thing’,” Jeannie repeats, but the disgust in her face is slowly losing ground to affection. “You are a big dumb jerk, Mer,” she says. “But you’re my big dumb brother jerk. So I guess I accept your apology.”

Rodney sighs and sips his tea and doesn’t say ‘thank you’. He adds, carefully, “You’re really smart Jeannie. I mean, smarter than pretty much everyone I work with… worked with,” he corrects. “Just… promise me you won’t let your skills atrophy? You were so close to your Masters…”

Jeannie frowns and sips her tea. “Maybe I’ll go back, after Maddy’s in kindergarten.”

Now Rodney says ‘thank you’, because he knows Jeannie’s smart enough to do the kind of work he used to, and also smart enough not to screw it up and get exiled to Sibera; the planet is going to need smart people like her once the program is declassified.

“Now John,” Jeannie says. She sips her tea again and waits.

Rodney rolls his cup back and forth between his palms. The porcelain is warm against his hands and he flexes his fingers. They still feel stiff, as if curled around a hard, cold steering wheel. 

Rodney wonders if anyone’s stolen his car yet. He hopes so; he hopes it’s already at the chop shop, torn into a hundred little untraceable pieces with everyone else’s’ fingerprints obscuring his own.

“He’s mine,” Rodney finally says, face set and voice unwavering.

Jeannie’s eyes go wide and round. “Meredith, he’s ten.”

But Rodney’s practiced this part, he knows this story: “His mother never told me. She died. I was listed on the birth certificate. Now I have a son.”

“Didn’t John have grandparents? Aunts or Uncles?” Jeannie seems genuinely worried for John, gazing out of the kitchen door to where John is cooing at baby Madison, holding her hands in his and guiding them through a little ditty and dance John’s mother or nanny must have done with him. Rodney wonders for a second if that’s the first time anyone’s heard that little song in over a century.

Jeannie doesn’t mean it that way, but Rodney still feels insulted.

“What, I’m not good enough to raise a kid?” he snaps, “You’re allowed and I’m not?” 

Jeannie’s head whips back around, gold curls bouncing around her shoulders, her eyes laser-beam narrow. “I didn’t say that, Meredith,” she protests, but he cuts her off.

“Of course you did!” he hisses, keeping his voice low so John can’t hear them arguing. “You don’t think that I’m capable of raising a child!”

“Mer, you don’t even like children,” Jeannie says helplessly.

“I like my own fine!” Rodney says, and he can’t figure out why he’s fighting this so hard, because it’s true, Rodney hates kids. He just doesn’t hate John, even if John isn’t really his own. He's never hated John. “Besides, he’s ten, most of the hard stuff’s over, right? No scary surprises in diapers, no frustration at his inability to communicate his needs, no temper tantrums!”

Jeannie has a sort of desperate look on her face. “He’ll be a teenager soon, Mer. There’ll be acne and girls and the sex talk and high school and music that you think is awful. He’ll want to borrow the car and you’ll say no and he’ll say that he hates you.”

“John would never hate me,” Rodney says, and he knows it to be truth. John isn’t like that. He wasn’t raised like that.

“He’ll hate you just because you’re his father, Mer.” Jeannie sighs and rubs her arms is a sort of awkward self-hug, and Rodney suddenly realizes that it’s because she would rather be hugging him.

For all that Rodney speaks expressively with his hands, he’s never been all that touchy-feely. Their whole family wasn’t into hugging or roughhousing, or goodnight kisses on cheeks. So it takes a lot for him to stand up and to open his arms and hold them out and make a face convincing enough to tell Jeannie that yes, he really does want to hug his sister.

She stands too, and moves into his embrace slowly, shuffling, like maybe she’s scared of spooking him off, and Rodney wraps his arms around her shoulders firmly to prove a point, and her arms go around his waist and he leans his cheek on the top of her head and they stand there and it’s… sort of nice.

“I just want to make sure you’re happy, Mer,” Jeannie says after a minute, her breath warm and comforting against his neck. She sort of smells like their mother, and it makes something prick against the back of his eyes, but he blinks it away.

“I am,” Rodney says, and he means it. “I want John. I want this.”

“Okay,” Jeannie says, and goes silent again. She hugs him tighter.

“Jeannie?” Rodney says softly, whispering into her hair.

“Yeah?”

“Are you happy?”

Jeannie pulls back, startled, and looks up into his face, and she smiles, even though there are tears in her eyes.

“Yeah, Mer,” she says, and she means it.


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Kaleb goes off to his office at the University of Toronto (“At least it’s not Ryerson,” Rodney mutters) and John is initiated into the joys of Lucky Charms.

Rodney has coffee, good coffee, bought at Tim Horton’s coffee and is terribly uncomfortable when Jeannie lifts her sweatshirt and lets Madison have her breakfast at the table with everyone else.

“Oh, um,” he says and looks away politely. John is thankfully distracted by the word puzzles on the back of the cereal box with creepy, cartoon Leprechaun.

“So what now?” Jeannie asks, sipping her own peppermint tea and patting Madison’s back with the other hand.

“Um,” Rodney says, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

“Well, do you have leads on a new job? Where are you even living?”

“I was renovating an old manor,” Rodney says, but stops. He doesn’t know how much he should tell her, in case she tells someone else and it gets back to someone he doesn’t want it to. “I was doing research there, but you know, with John now… I don’t know,” he admits. Because he really doesn’t.

He has no freaking clue what comes next.

It’s not as if he can just pack John back into the car and drive again until they’re both cranky and exhausted. The whole point of leaving the manor and Carson and the SGC was so that John could have a normal life. So that he could make friends his own age – he own apparent age – and do hockey camp and grow up like any other kid.

But now Rodney has no idea how to give him that life.

They’re both fugitives, even if Rodney’s the only one who knows it. It won’t take long for the SGC to find them here, and Rodney wonders if he should even bother running more. In the end, John’s just going to end up in some lab. Maybe the best Rodney can do is give him a few days of normallacy, a few days of playing in the autumn crisp parks of Toronto and eating junk food and going to as many museums and zoos as Rodney can jam into 48 hours.

Because Rodney has no illusions that the SGC will have found them by the end of that time. There are only so many bolt holes that Rodney McKay can go to, and eventually someone’s going to remember that he has a sister.

That, and Rodney’s cash is slowly running out. He’d withdrawn a few thousand dollars from his bank account back in the states, before they’d started the heavy driving, but soon enough he’s going to need to pay for something, pay Jeannie back for groceries if nothing else, and then he’s going to need an ATM, and then they’ll have John.

Rodney puts his face in his hands and takes deep breaths and tries very hard not to panic.

This is the stupidest thing he’s ever done in his life, and he’s done amazingly stupid things. Telling Sam Carter to sacrifice Teal’c was, until now, at the top of the list, followed closely by being an ass to his sister, and third, never getting around to a cat.

He doubts they’re going to let him have a cat in Guantanamo.

“Mer?” Jeannie says softly, and her hand in on his shoulder. “Being a new parent is hard, I know, but you’ll figure it out. It gets… well, not easier, but you learn to start rolling with the punches a bit better.”

Rodney laughs. He can’t help it. Jeannie has no idea how hard this is going to become.

 

* * *

 

After breakfast, Jeannie has a local circle of new moms coming over for some sort of hippie-dippie baby yoga thing. She makes a sly comment about her single father brother attending, and Rodney has this absurd vision of manipulating John like a pretzel while desperate horny housewives look on and drool.

“No thank you!” Rodney yelps and has him and John in their outerwear within minutes. First they walk down Danforth Avenue, towards the impressive Bloor Street Viaduct Bridge.

John has seen trolleys and trains, planes and cars and trucks on television before, but he still laughs as the trolley rings its gong and jumps when a motorcycle cuts by, nearly running the red. 

They stand on the bridge until Rodney can’t feel his nose any more, watching the traffic on the Don Valley parkway below whiz by. The bridge is smothered with cables and netting to keep jumpers from landing on someone’s car, and Rodney never quite understood why this bridge was, and the five other bridges spanning the Don Valley weren’t.

They find the footpath down to the Don Valley River Park and walk through the rustling piles of gold and red leaves. John asks every question about everything. Why do the leaves change colours and where are all the people in the cars going and what’s pollution and how big is Toronto and was there really a war between Canada and America?

“Yes,” Rodney grunts, hands shoved in his pockets. “And it was over before you were even born, so I don’t know why you don’t know about it. Canada won, by the way.”

John looks dubious.

After a long silence, John crouches down beside the river and watches the last of the mosquitoes and dragonflies skimming along the surface of the rushing pools. No fish jump to snap them up; the river is too dirty, too salty from dozens of years of melting snow run off, too overfished back in the early days of the town.

John picks blades of grass, carefully, one by one, and sends them spinning into the wind, watching how they fall, where, how long it takes them to sink. Rodney sits beside him on a rock and waits John out. He calculates lift and balance and aerodynamics in his head.

Finally, John looks up and says, “Why did we run away?”

Rodney should have known. John was a smart kid, he would have figured it out eventually. Still, he can’t help the automatic, “Who said we were running away?”

“You and Carson were fighting. About … me,” John says.

Rodney is still pretty new to the hugging thing, but he puts his arm around John’s shoulders and pulls him close anyway. John holds himself stiff, side just barely touching Rodney’s stomach, but his closest hand snakes out and finds its way into hooking onto Rodney’s belt loops.

“Look,” Rodney says softly, “Remember all those stories about the StarGate and the aliens and stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re all true.”

John doesn’t say anything, but Rodney can see that he is thinking, processing this shift in the reality of his world. He is ten, ten year olds bounce back, accept new truths and logics pretty easily, but he is still just a kid who is severely out of his time, and suffering at least some depression or PTSD from having died.

Finally, John says, “Okay.”

“Now, the technology we used to make your new body was stuff from the SGC, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But you know me and the SGC don’t get along anymore.”

“Because of Sam Carter?”

“Uh, yeah,” Rodney says, and wonders if he is ever going to have to correct that oversight; he’d made it out to sound like Sam had been out to get him, which she totally had been, but maybe if John is going to be property of the SGC for the rest of his life, Rodney should make sure that he doesn’t hate Sam without meeting her, at least. “Anyway, so Carson works for the SGC and used SGC stuff, so, you know… the, uh, the SGC wants… wants to… with you…”

Rodney stands up and picks up a rock and throws it as hard as he can into the river. It makes a loud splash and doesn’t make Rodney feel any better.

“They want to take me away?” John asks quietly. He is standing now too, hands folded behind his back, head down, like he is being scolded.

“I won’t let them!” Rodney says fiercely. He grabs John’s shoulders. “I won’t let it happen.”

“Will we have to drive again? Drive lots?” John asks.

“If we have to, we will,” Rodney promises.

“Oh.” John looks up, eyes following the cloud trail from the planes taking off from the airport on the far side of the city. 

Rodney follows his gaze, up into the clear blue that John years for.

“I don’t know what to do, John,” Rodney admits. “I really don’t. They’re smart, they have a lot of money, they have more people.”

“It’s okay, Rodney,” John says softly. “I’m alive again, right? So, I mean… as long as you’re there with me… You will be with me, right, Rodney?”

“Right,” Rodney lies, pulling John close. “Of course. I’ll be right there the whole time. Do you want to go to the zoo?”

* * *

Rodney isn’t all that surprised when he and John come home from the Ontario Science Center the next afternoon to find Carson sitting in the kitchen with Jeannie, having a cup of tea.

John tugs out of Rodney’s grip and says “Carson!” and runs across the living room in his boots and throws himself into Carson’s lap. John is smiling and squirming out of his coat and trying to hug Carson all at the same time. “Hi, Carson!” he says. “I didn’t know you were coming to visit us today!”

“Aye, well, it was a bit of a surprise for me too, lad,” Carson says with a conspiratorial wink, but when he looks up over John’s head at Rodney, his glare is thunderous.

“Meredith,” Jeannie says, and her whole voice and expression are tight. There are lines around her eyes and mouth, and Rodney’s stomach twists. “Can we talk outside?”

Rodney wants to say ‘no’. He wants to grab John and run. But he knows, now, that there’s no where he can go that the SGC can’t find them; he sort of knew it all along, but he didn’t want to admit it, not until the SGC forced the issue. He was sort of hoping that maybe they’d just drop it all together when they got sick of chasing him, but who is Rodney kidding?

He stole U.S. government property.

They were always going to catch him and take it back.

Jeannie and Rodney step out onto the back porch, the breeze cool and cutting on the exposed skin on the back of Rodney’s neck, his ears, his wrists. They leave Carson and John within sight lines, but out of earshot. Rodney stares anxiously through the window at them, terrified that any second Carson and John are going to be swept away in a beam of Asguard teleportation light. He waits for a minute, but Carson is just listening to John recount his day at the Science Centre, nodding and smiling indulgently, so Rodney finally turns his attention to Jeannie.

She’s pulled something out of her pocket, a folded up photocopy of a birth certificate that declares Carson Beckett the father of John Sheppard, not Rodney.

“I don’t understand,” she says, holding the paper up for him to see. “Explain.”

“I can’t,” Rodney says. “I… it’s top secret.”

“It’s… what?” Jeannie asks, and he’s confused, genuinely confused. “How is your son – his son – top secret? How is that even possible?”

“I can’t… Jeannie, I signed the non-disclosure… I can’t.”

Jeannie crosses her arms and sets her jaw and scowls in a way that is so completely McKay that Rodney is too flabbergasted to say anything for a long moment. “I don’t care about your stupid top secret government bullshit, Mer,” she snarls. “Explain to me how you took the son of another man and told me he was yours. You lied to me Mer! You’re a wanted fugitive and you’re hiding in my house, endangering my family.”

Rodney feels like something on the bottom of a shoe. “Jesus, Jeannie, I didn’t think--”

“No!” Jeannie shouts, and she shoves him, actually shoves him so hard he bounces off the wall. “No, of course you didn’t! You’re Meredith fucking Rodney McKay! You can do whatever you want and damn the rest of us!”

“Jeannie, no--” he tries, but she’s worked up a good head of steam by now and she’s determined to say what she has to say.

“Enough, Mer!” she snarls. “It’s just… enough! You can’t just come back here and use me again, you can’t use that little boy just to get what you want! You left, Mer, do you understand that? You left! Mom and Dad were fighting and Dad was hitting Mom and you fucked off to Northeastern and you left me behind!”

Rodney reaches up, reaches across the gulf of too many years and a lot of spectacularly bad choices, but Jeannie doesn’t reach back, Jeannie steps away and keeps yelling, because that’s all McKays do – they yell at each other.

“And then Mom left and when Dad had no one left to hit, he started hitting me instead, and you didn’t come, Mer, you didn’t come home and rescue me. Oh, no, you had nothing to gain so you just hid out in California with your stupid scholarships and your stupid government contracts and you pretended we didn’t exist, until you needed me, until you realized I was smart, and I could help you, and then, oh yeah, then you decided to take an interest in my life and get me into school so you could use me against your rivals, to make your research better, but not when I chose my own life, no, then I was no sister of yours!”

“I only wanted what was best for you,” Rodney says, miserably, because he really was the penultimate asshole when she put it all like that.

“And who says you get to decide what’s best for me?” Jeannie rages.

Rodney feels his own anger crackle suddenly up his spine. “Because I’m your brother!”

Jeannie takes a step back and goes completely white. Then she starts laughing. It isn’t nice laughter, it is mean and bitter and hurt.

“Not from where I’m standing, you’re not,” Jeannie says softly, once the laughter has abated. “You haven’t acted like a brother in years.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Rodney tries, but it’s too late, and he knows it’s too late, he can see it in her expression, in the way her eyes have gone icy and cold. “But John, don’t let John suffer because I’m a fuckwit,” he pleads.

“I don’t understand,” Jeannie says, by way of demanding an explanation. She flicks her eyes over to the window, where John is now showing Carson the brochure, pointing out every exhibit in that careful, controlled way he has. 

John may have been reborn in the twenty first century, but his manners and his mannerisms are forever trapped in 1850s. Rodney finds it endearing.

“He’s an experiment,” Rodney says, finally. It’s the closest to the truth he can get without explaining about Ancients and Asguards and StarGates. “He’s what my research was, with the government.”

“But… you’re an astrophysicist,” Jeannie protests, latching onto that fact. Rodney thinks it’s because she doesn’t want to think about a child as an experiment.

“I worked with Carson,” Rodney says, “He’s a geneticist. John is… John’s a clone.”

Jeanie jerks back, face going white. “Don’t be stupid,” she says, but he can tell that she’s wavering between believing the awful truth of it, and hating Rodney even more for trying to use this sort of sci fi bullshit story on her. “Everybody knows that they can’t clone human beings yet.”

“Who’s everybody?” Rodney challenges. “It was top secret. But I screwed up, and they sent me to Sibera in punishment, and when I got back I quit. But then I found out what they’d done – what my work – had made and I couldn’t…” He reaches out, tries to grab Jeannie’s hands, and she steps away, not ready to let him touch her yet. “He’s just a little boy, Jeannie,” Rodney says desperately, hopes that she can see what he means in his eyes. “He’s only a few months old. He deserves… better.”

This time he succeeds in grabbing her elbows looking her in the eye.

“Please understand,” he pleads, “I had nowhere else to go. What do I know about kids? Nothing! I needed help.”

Jeannie snorts. “So you brought a kidnapped child over the border to my house, turning me and my family into traitors for harbouring an international fugitive. Did you even think, Mer? Did it ever occur to you what they’d do to us when they caught you? What would happen to my daughter when Kaleb and I get tossed in jail?”

Rodney feels all the blood drain out of his face. “God, I really am a fuckup of a brother, aren’t I?” he asks miserably.

“Yes, Mer, you are,” Jeannie says. Her voice is soft and sad again.

“I’ll… I’ll do what I can to … to keep you guys out of it,” he promises. “I’ll make whatever deals I need to. You won’t suffer because I screwed up.”

“That willnae be necessary, Rodney, ya great git,” Carson says from behind them, and Rodney jerks around to stare. Carson is standing in the patio door, face stern but expression bordering on fond. John is standing behind him, one fist wound into Carson’s pant leg, a worried look on his face. 

John always did understand far too much.

“The Millers arenae in trouble.”

Rodney lets out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding.

“What happens next?” he asks. “Can John and I go?”

“No,” Carson says softly, shaking his head sadly. “No, c’mon. There’s a car waiting for us.” He looks down at John. “Go pack your things. We have a long flight ahead of us.”

“Flight?” John asks. “In a jet plane?”

Carson looks queasy. “In a helicopter, I’m afraid.”

Helicopter. That means Area 51. Rodney’s head spins and he feels about five seconds away from puking, but John is excited, his face has lit up, and he runs off to gather up his meager clothing, the stuffed horse that Kaleb surprised him with last night, the model Piper-J they just bought at the Science Centre.

“You too, Rodney,” Carson says. 

He doesn’t add, don’t even think of running again, but Rodney can hear it all the same.

“Meredith?” Jeannie says, and her voice is tremulous, asking and terrified of the answer all at once. She reaches out a hand, snags the material at his elbow.

“Thank you, Jeannie,” Rodney says, and leans over to kiss her forehead. “Good bye.”

Jeannie is crying when he pulls away, turns to go into the house. Carson shuts the patio door behind them and Jeannie is left out on the porch, alone, her face hidden in her hands.


	4. Chapter 4

Their pilot is standing on the tarmac at Camp Borden waiting for them beside the insectile helicopter as they exit the black SUV. When they get close enough, Rodney realizes it’s Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell, and Rodney might have been flattered if it didn’t mean that he was such a security risk that they sent SG-1 after him.

“Heya, Doc,” Mitchell says and smiles at him, like Rodney hasn’t just been apprehended with stolen SGC goods. “And this must be your son, John. Hiya, John.”

John shoots an uncertain look at Rodney, and Rodney nods. John takes the proffered hand. “Hiya, sir,” he says.

“Did you have a good time visiting Aunt Jeannie?” Mitchell asks.

“Yes, sir?”

Mitchell laughs and plucks the aviator glasses off of his own nose and plants them firmly on John’s.

“Son?” Rodney asks.

Carson unfolds a new document, a birth certificate not unlike the one they’ve left a copy of at Jeannie’s, only this time, where it says ‘father’, the name ‘Carson Beckett’ has been replaced with ‘M. Rodney McKay.’

“I… I don’t understand,” Rodney says.

“Saddle up, boys,” Mitchell calls before Carson can explain any further, and Rodney looks over to see that he’s already got John all strapped into the co-pilot’s seat, a ridiculously oversized helmet clamped onto his head, and an equally ridiculous over sized smile on his face.

It’s terrifying.

If Rodney kicked up a fuss now it would be all too easy for Mitchell to just ditch him and take off with John. Rodney’s never gotten himself into a helicopter and buckled up so fast in his life. He jams on the headset so he can hear John.

John’s got his horse cuddle toy on his lap; Rodney had scoffed at the idea that a ten year old needed teddy, but Jeannie said, “Mer, everybody needs a best friend who isn’t their father.” Right now Rodney’s glad he has it. The horse is strapped in to the seat with John, and John seems to be doing his best not to touch anything, like Mitchell told him to, mostly by holding the horses’ legs and making his hand motions mimic Mitchell’s as Mitchell goes through his preflight. John’s not wearing the aviators any more, and Rodney suspects it’s because they kept falling down his nose.

Carson gets in the helicopter and sits directly in front of Rodney and some ground personnel close and lock the doors. That’s it, then. The propellers start to whir and John makes a high sound of fright, eyes going massive.

Rodney reaches around behind his seat. It’s an awkward angle, but it gives John a chance to clutch at his forearm, little fingernails digging in deep.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Mitchell says over the headset, and that reminds Rodney that he can talk to John.

He says, “John? You can talk to me. Talk into the microphone.”

“Like the… the relay?” John asks. 

“Yeah.”

“Am I dead?”

The three adults in the chopper look at each other, then away, immediately. Mitchell flicks switches Rodney’s sure he’s already flicked before, Carson folds and refolds the birth certificate, and Rodney just tightens his grip on John’s leg.

“No, John,” Carson says. “It’s just a microphone, aye?”

“Okay,” John says. “Hey Rodney, we’re gonna fly!” 

“Yeah, John,” Rodney says. He wants to put his face in his hands, but he can’t let go of John, won’t, even though his shoulder is starting to ache in protest.

* * *

About twenty minutes into the flight they’re approaching the border, and Mitchell is still patiently explaining everything to John, what this switch does and what a horizon indicator is and how the propellers create lift. He stops them in midair directly over Niagara Falls to show John how helicopters can hover.

Rodney isn’t sure if he’s mad at Mitchell for being so damn nice to the kid when they were on their way to making him a lab rat. It’s sweet of Mitchell to be showing him all this stuff, but at the same time, Rodney would rather John hated the bastard. That would make it easier for them to deal with what was about to happen.

Rodney had to let go of John a few minutes in, his arm aching, and now he’s just sitting there, rubbing it.

“Are you ever gonna look at me, Rodney?” Carson asks over the headset and Rodney shoots him a glare so deadly that Carson actually snaps back in his seat.

“We are not having this discussion with John listening.”

In the front seat, John has gone still.

“Hey,” Mitchell says, “John, tell me all about the Toronto Zoo. I’ve never been to it. Are there lions?” And then there’s an unmistakable click as Mitchell switches Rodney and Carson’s headsets over to a secured channel.

Rodney goes back to massaging his arm and staring at his shoelaces.

Finally, Carson says, “You’re an asshole, Rodney.”

Rodney flinches, but doesn’t look up. He’s confused; Carson doesn’t sound as mad as he expected, he sounds almost fond.

“Did you think we were going to lock John up in a containment unit? Make him spend days with electrodes strapped to his head and let them carve him into tiny pieces?”

Rodney flinches again, because, yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what he thought was going to happen. Carson hands him the birth certificate again, and Rodney stares at it for a long time. Father: M. Rodney McKay.

“I didnae realize how much John meant to you,” Carson says softly. “I should have explained better; John, we just want him nearby the mountain. It’s not… it’s not like you think. Cassandra Fraiser and John O’Neil… it’ll be like that, and you… they want you to have your job back. Work on the stuff from the Antarctic base.”

“Why didn’t…” Rodney says, then balls his hand – the one not holding the birth certificate – into a fist. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Because you panicked and jumped to the worst conclusion, like you always do, and then shanghaied John away.”

Rodney glares at Carson. “Who even says ‘shanghaied’ anymore?”

Carson smiles.

“Am I in trouble? For… kidnapping John?”

“No. I told them you were taking him on a trip to Toronto to help your sister with the baby. I didnae say anything about you sneaking out in the middle of the night, or packing like you’d never come back. Your computers are trashed, by the way. And I kept backups of my own research in my room, so thank ye for thinking me such a gormless idiot.”

Rodney groans. Right, the worm.

“Carson, I--”

Carson holds up his hand. “I understand, Rodney. I might have done the same myself.”

Rodney breathes out a sigh of relief. He’s not in trouble with the SGC, not any more than usual, John will be okay, and he’s not a wanted criminal or terrorist.

“Jeannie,” Rodney says, jerking upright. “She thinks--”

“She’ll have already had a call from General O’Neill at this point,” Carson says, “He’s undoing that silly farfetched story you told and explaining that you jumped the gun.”

Rodney nods, but wants to call Jeannie himself, let her hear his voice, apologize to her in his own words.

“He’s a special kid,” Carson says softly. They both know their talking less about John and more about what they feel for him.

“Yeah, he is,” Rodney agrees.

They say nothing else to each other until they reach Colorado.

 

* * *

 

Rodney was expecting Area 51, so stepping onto the helipad at Cheyenne Mountain is something of a surprise. The airmen on duty salute to Mitchell and then salute to John, who repeats the gesture right back.

Rodney hunches his shoulders in and follows after them. John’s got the hand that isn’t holding Horse wrapped around Mitchell’s calloused fingers, staring up at him worshipfully. They all pause in the washroom on the surface level to get back into some semblance of order, emptying bladders and smoothing out travel wrinkled clothing. Rodney wishes he had a blazer. Then Mitchell and Carson go through the ritual of electronic finger printing, retina scans and ID swipes. Rodney has to spend a half hour getting a whole new ID card and new baseline scans.

“Aren’t I already in the computer?” he snarls when yet another airman comes at him with yet another something that’s pokey.

“You quit, Doc,” Mitchell says, and oh yeah, he’s having way too much fun with this.

John suffers it all with quiet interest, and Rodney is reminded yet again of the schism between where John was raised and where he is now. In John’s time, children didn’t complain, at least not in public.

“Are you tired?” Rodney asks. “Hungry?”

“C’n I have an Egg McMuffin?” John asks, and his voice is very little. He’s getting a bit overwhelmed, and Rodney doesn’t blame him.

“Okay, that’s it!” Rodney says and hoists John up onto his hip. “Shoo!” he snaps at the next airman to come near them.

“Rodney,” Carson chastises softly.

“No!” Rodney says. “We’re just going to be right down stairs and we’re going to have to suffer through your medical check too, so that’s enough of this. They can fill in the blanks on my card with my old records, and they can get the rest of John’s stuff later. Right now we’re going downstairs where it’s quiet and there’s coffee and apple juice and maybe English muffins.”

“The coffee’s for me,” John says, and it’s so deadpan that even Rodney has to do a double take.

“Who taught you sarcasm?” Rodney asks.

John beams. “Kaleb is an English Major.”

“Right, right,” Rodney groans, “of course, revenge,” and barrels through the knot of protesting airmen towards the elevators. Mitchell and Carson are on their heels. The doors hiss open and Rodney darts into the elevator, daring Mitchell with his eyes to drag them back out again.

Mitchell looks at John and sighs, and he and Carson get in too.

Mitchell punches in the floor for the medical bay, as Rodney predicted, and then they are on their way down. The elevator is calm and quiet and John relaxes a little more into Rodney’s side.

“We gonna see aliens and the StarGate?” John whispers into the whooshing quiet.

“Hopefully not, and probably,” Carson answers. “Have you been eating your vegetables, John? Or has Rodney been feeding you a steady diet of take out?”

“Hey,” Rodney protests. “I’ll have you know that we’ve been eating nothing but vegetables. The idiot English Major has turned my sister into a vegetarian.”

“Vegetarians eat carbs,” Mitchell says.

“Shut up.”

John giggles.

“Swell parental influence you are, McKay,” Mitchell says, but its strangely not mean-sounding. Rodney is a bit flummoxed. Nobody at the SGC has ever teased him before.

Is it because he’s a Dad now, his cranky image has been shattered, everyone thinks he’s just a big old softy? Oh, no, Rodney will show them. He’ll be twice the task master he was before, there’ll be no disrespect or getting away with goofing off in his labs.

Rodney swallows; unless they bust him back down. Oh, the thought of having to answer to Lee or Kavanaugh… it galls. Maybe he’ll just do contract work out at his manor. Of course, the whole point of giving Rodney his job back is to keep John close by. If Rodney leaves, would they let him take John, too?

He gives into the urge to rub his cheek through John’s messy black hair.

“Rodney?” John asks softly. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Rodney says. “I’m just nervous.”

“About meeting Sam Carter?” John asks, and Mitchell’s head whips around. Rodney makes a ‘shut up shut up!’ face but John doesn’t seem to get the message and adds, “I bet she’ll fall madly in love with you this time,” he says triumphantly and what Rodney wouldn’t give for a hole in the floor to open up and swallow him whole right about now.

Mitchell hoots with laughter and Carson looks uncomfortable on Rodney’s behalf. Mitchell is still going on with his protracted hooting, which Rodney think is actually rather rude, it’s not that funny, when they enter the medical bay.

A pretty dark haired woman comes over, swats Mitchell’s shoulder, and holds her hand out to John. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Doctor Lam.”

“Doctor like Rodney or Doctor like Carson?” John asks, his eyes roving the banks of computer screens and curtained beds. There’s a trolly with medical tools that Rodney recognizes far too well waiting by the closest bed, already to inflict pain and torture on him and John.

“Doctor like Carson,” Dr. Lam says, and plucks John out of Rodney’s death grip so easily Rodney wonders if it’s something she was taught in med school, or just something about being a woman.

She’s chatting to John already, showing what she’s going to do to him on Horse, first, checking his throat for nodes and tell-tale gua’ould shaped lumps, testing pupil receptivity, listening to his lungs and heart, taking blood. She declares him “perfect”, and Rodney knows that this time, it’s not hyperbole. John is perfect, scarily so, and it just reminds him that the boy is a clone.

Carson isn’t near as gentle with Rodney’s exam, but Rodney supposes he deserves it. He has vague notions of taking Carson out for a beer, if he can find a sitter for John he trusts, and explaining everything, to maybe say sorry, as best as he can with his inability to make English work.

They’re ushered next into the debriefing room, where a plate of sandwiches and a pot of coffee are waiting. There’s a jug of orange juice too, which Rodney immediately demands the airman on guard removes, but it’s John who gets up in the guy’s face about Rodney’s citrus allergy, and Rodney thinks, yeah. That’s my son.

* * *

There are some files on the table, and one file comes with coloured crayons. Rodney steals the purple one, just because he can, and he and John decorate the cover of John’s cream coloured file in jet planes and stars and the mathematical equations of flight. In the corner, John draws a sky blue toboggan. 

“Colorado has lots of mountains and hills,” Rodney says. “We can go when there’s enough snow.”

“No, thank you,” John says, unfailingly, still bizarrely polite. “I don’t like tobogganing anymore.”

Rodney’s heart clenches and he covers it by gulping his coffee and pouring a new mug full. John tries his and doesn’t like it and goes for the water instead.

* * *

They are kept waiting another ten minutes, and Rodney spends it jotting down ideas, equations, coding, and general doodles all over the first two pages of the legal notepad they included with the piles of papers in the folder.

He hates being kept waiting.

His whole career with the Air Force has been hurry-up-and-wait. Usually he has a laptop or something with him so the time isn’t a total waste, but Rodney’s trashed his laptops and he has John to entertain.

Though the boy is doing a good job of entertaining himself at the moment.

John has learned how to spin his chair and around and around and around just by using the centrifugal force of his own small frame. He’s going to make himself sick if he keeps doing that, and it would serve General Landry right if the kid puked right on his uniform. Make them wait, would he?

Rodney would flip through the paperwork, except that he knows they’re going to go through it, page by excruciating page in the meeting, so he’s not going to make this any more boring for himself than it already promises to be.

Only, it could never be that boring, because it’s John they’re bargaining over. Rodney hopes they’ll at least have the decency to let John leave the room when it gets to the tough stuff.


	5. Chapter 5

Rodney never says to them that he doesn’t know what to do with this, this little thing that burns and twists in his chest, this other little thing that needs him now, that clings to him, that crawls into his lap at the sight of Teal’c lumbering into the room, and doesn’t move.

“I’ve never seen a Negro, before,” John whispers and Rodney could near die of shame. Only, of course John hasn’t, unless his family had servants (they were in the North of the States, and Rodney thinks the emancipation was before John’s time, but now he’s not sure and another knot of anxiety twists itself into existence behind Rodney’s stomach. He’s going to get ulcers, he swears).

This is something that Rodney is going to repair as soon as he has the free time. He spares a moment to be angry that the whole room is filled with Caucasians, except for Teal’c and Lam, and Rodney doesn’t know where she falls. What sort of Representation of Earth is this supposed to be, anyway?

But he doesn’t know where to start in this whole ‘educating John’ thing.

He doesn’t tell them that he’s scared he’ll say or do something that will scar the kid for life. He doesn’t tell them that he has no idea how to be a father and enforce bedtimes and ground somebody. He doesn’t know how to ask for help with the psychotherapy that the kid’s going to need for just getting over the fact that he’s been dead / half-ascended for the last hundred and fifty years.

He doesn’t tell them that the most fun he’s had in the last three months has been sitting at the table with John, drawing pictures of the universe in wax crayon, while Landry and SG-1 and Carson and Lam file in around them.

What he does say, once everyone is seated and before anyone else can start talking, is this: “If we’re going to talk property, then I bought Sheppard Manor and the kid came as part of the package deal.”

It’s gratifying to see General Landry’s jaw drop to the table top.

“McKay!” Carter scolds. Jackson just finishes pouring his coffee and begins flipping through the file folder.

“No,” Rodney says. “I want to make it clear, right here, right now. If you’re going to pull any sort of ‘owes us’ crap, I have prior claim. John is not a lab rat. John is not an Ancient. John is not the result of your technology and not yours to do with as you please. John is a little boy who has been a ghost for a century and a half and now he is alive and now he is my son and I won’t let the SGC do the sort of things to him that I’ve heard you’ve done to others. So.” 

He lifts his chin defiantly and if John is shaking against his chest, fists rolled into the tee-shirt stretched across Rodney’s belly, well, Rodney can deal with that later, even if it does make something in his stomach go sour. Therapist, definitely; maybe one that can treat both of them, someone with clearance so John doesn’t have to lie.

“We get it, Doctor McKay,” Landry says, and looks faintly ill. Good.

“Good,” Rodney says, just to be sure. “Because, you know, slavery is illegal,” he feels it important to add, especially after John’s Negro comment. God, Rodney doesn’t have any idea what John was raised to think about this sort of thing. 

“Whoa, whoa, McKay!” Carter says. “Put down the protests signs.”

“Rodney is just looking out for wee John, is all,” Carson soothes. “Presupposing all our arguments.”

“M’not wee,” John mumbles into Rodney’s shirt.

“What was that, sport?” Mitchell asks, reaching out to rub a hand through John’s wild hair. He has no better success at smoothing it down than either Rodney or Jeannie had, and none at all in comforting John, who flinches away from the touch. Rodney feels stupidly proud for a moment that he is the one that John goes to for comfort.

“M’not wee,” John insists louder, but he turns his face further into Rodney’s chest, negating the effects of the increased volume. His nose is slightly pokey.

Rodney lifts his hands, runs one soothingly down John’s back, and waves the other in the air in frustration. “Carson,” he reproves lightly.

“What we are here for, Doctor McKay,” Landry says tactfully, hauling the conversation by its horns back onto course, “is to discuss your future with the SGC, and by extension, young Mister Sheppard’s.”

Rodney nods slowly. “What do you want?” he asks.

Everyone exchanges long and varied glances. Carter is the one to break first. “For you? Same job, based here, overseeing the lion’s share of the ZedPM research.”

Rodney fleet grin splits his face before he can register that it was happening. “You need me, admit it!”

Sam looks queasy at admitting anything at all and Rodney wonders if she’s eaten something bad at lunch.

“We need you, McKay,” Landry says with a put upon sigh, which, really. “You’ll be given a suite on base if you want it, or we’ll get the base realtor on getting and furnishing a new apartment to your liking. No sensitive material off base, of course, and--”

“Yadda yadda, it’s all in the contracts,” Rodney interrupts. “What about John? You can’t expect him to stay in just a suite on base; we’ll have to take the apartment. A house would be better, though. I’ll want to vet all the schools in the area, of course. None can possibly be good enough, though with SGC’s kids all over the town somebody’s bound to have a decent maths program, right? Or music; John, do you like music? Can you play the piano?”

John makes no reply but an unreadable shoulder shrug.

“I’m sorry, ‘we’?” Jackson asks. Rodney’s arms tighten around John involuntarily. “I was under the impression that Mr. Sheppard was going to be the ward of Dr. Beckett, or, or the SGC.”

“Oh, cause that’s a fantastic idea!” Rodney snaps. “Take a child who has lost his parents away from the one person who seems to be looking out for him as a human being instead of a collection of genes! Great idea! And while John is a ward of the SGC, why don’t you make a documentary about it? Huh! You can call it The Truman Show Revisited!”

Jackson sets down his coffee and gets ready to argue, but Carson’s soft cough catches everyone’s attention.

“Ah,” Carson interjects tactfully, and unfolds the new Birth Certificate. “The General and I agreed that, given John’s attachment, perhaps it was best that the living situation was … altered slightly.”

Jackson stares at the certificate and splutters. “McKay? A Dad?! Do we have enough money in the health benefits package to cover that much therapy?”

Teal’c just raises an eyebrow and intones an ‘indeed’, and Rodney has had it. What is with everyone assuming that he is going to drop John on his head or teach him to chew with his mouth open or become the antichrist? Rodney is a damn good father so far, at least he thinks so and Jeannie hadn’t disagreed too much (she was his sister, and an experienced parent, she’s allowed to critique, but not anyone else). Rodney draws in the breath to say as much, but is beat to it by John.

“You just be quiet!” the boy says, shooting upright to kneel with his boney knobby knees on Rodney’s thighs, shaking with real anger. “You’re mean!” he declares. “You’re all so mean to Rodney! You need him because he’s really smart and you’re not nice to him at all!”

Rodney feels his face start to burn.

“Rodney took care of me when I was all alone and he told me stories and he fixed my toboggan and he brought Carson to help make me alive and he’s really cool, so you can just be quiet! You’re jerks!”

Silence, wide and startled, fills the room. It is the longest speech anyone had heard John make all day.

Rodney can’t help pulling his chin back when John then turns to look him seriously in the eye and say, “You’re not allowed to make Sam Carter fall in love with you. I don’t like her.”

Sam covers her face with her hands, and Mitchell looks at the table top and bites his bottom lip. Teal’c is as expressionless as ever, Jackson masks his reaction by taking a sip of coffee, and Carson looks mortified on Rodney’s behalf.

“No problem of that now,” Rodney says with a sigh. When no one adds anything else, Rodney goes on: “So, we want a house, with a big backyard, close to a good school, preferably a short commute to the mountain.”

John blinks and looks up into Rodney’s face. “Rodney,” he says softly.

“Hm?” Rodney has the notion that John is going to ask for an airplane of his own, too, or maybe something ridiculous like a water slide, but instead he says, “What about Sheppard Manor?”

Oh. Sometimes, Rodney forgets that John is one hundred and fifty.

“We’ll keep it, you and me,” Rodney promises around a lump in his throat. “For vacations. I mean, it was always meant to be yours and now that, uhm, you’re, you know…” the word mine doesn’t seem to want to come out, “then you can inherit it, umm, again.”

“Okay,” John says, and sits back into Rodney’s lap. He’s far from settled or soothed, but he’s ready to stop thinking about all of this right now. Frankly, so is Rodney, but he doesn’t have the luxury of just sitting back and letting other people decide the hard stuff for him. He’s the Dad now. It’s his job.

John opens his crayoned folder and begins to look at the pages with a very serious face. He can’t possibly understand anything they say, but he’s imitating Jackson’s thoughtful frown as he flips through to look at the colour print outs of digitally enhanced photographs of something biological.

“Well, that’s settled then,” Landry says, jotting notes on his own legal pad. Then he folds his hands and looks up at Doctor Lam and Carson. “Doctors?” he asks.

Lam clears her throat and says, “We think seeing John one day a week should be fine; check up in the med bay to make sure the Asguard…” she trails off and makes an up and down motion to indicate John and hint at all the possible defects that could occur during the cloning process, “and then Carson will have some samples to take – urine, blood, that sort of thing – get some numbers, track some changes, stuff for the ATA projects.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Landry allows. “McKay?”

Rodney starts, wondering how on Earth that all of this has suddenly become his responsibility, caring for John, protecting him for his own best interest, setting up his schedules. Rodney visited a lot of doctors as a kid; hypoglycemia, fatal allergies, hypertension – Rodney was a pretty scrawny, sickly thing, and his best friend at age six was the allergist because he saw her more than his school mates.

“Just one day,” Rodney concedes. “A few hours after school okay?” He looks down at John, thinking that the boy ought to have some sort of investment in his own future, some sort of say, but John is preoccupied with looking at photographs of his gravesite in the file. “John?” Rodney repeats softly and jostles one knee. John looks up; his hazel eyes are wide and slightly hunted. Rodney plucks the folder out of his hand before John can be exposed to any other traumatic or haunting sights until Rodney’s had a chance to go through the file himself and remove anything that might be harmful. 

“Yes, Rodney?” John says, distant and thoughtful. He gets more polite when he’s that way, more formal, more sunk into the old mannerisms of the last time he was alive.

“Would it be okay for you to spend a few hours every week with Carson in his lab?”

Rodney isn’t sure John understands the full connotations of ‘in his lab’, but he nods his head anyway and the rest of the assembled party heaves a sigh of relief.

“Last thing,” Sam says slowly, “before you and John are okay to go; we want John in the labs, to, you know, turn things on, and think at them so we can figure them out. Your work days are going to be longer than his school ones – John can get dropped off here after class. Think of it as daycare with a lab full of babysitters.”

“I was on board until you put it like that,” Rodney says, wrinkling his nose. He can’t imagine Lee or Kavanaugh or Zelsiki or Kusa-whatsername will be too happy minding a rug rat. But John is extremely well behaved and Rodney thinks that it might be exciting for him to be surrounded by so many stimulating things; it will be good for his education, if nothing else, to be around so much math and so much science.

“Rodney,” Sam says, and her tone is slightly wheedling. Not quite the begging that Rodney has always imagined, but its close enough. “We need a light switch. It’s as simple as that. We can’t test anything until we can turn it on, and since General O’Neill moved to Homeworld Security, and Dr. Beckett has his own research to focus on...”

“Fine,” Rodney huffs. “But he’s not testing anything that might be a weapon,” Rodney says firmly.

“McKay,” Mitchell replies with a barely contained eye roll. “Even if you had the ATA gene, we wouldn’t let you test anything that might be a weapon. Personnel with weapons and emergency training only get to test the weapons.”

“Oh.”

“Which means no kids, okay? We’re not about to jeopardize the strongest natural expression of the ATA gene since O’Neill… since before O’Neill, ‘cause John’s short a few extra generations that could have watered it down.”

“Okay, okay!” Rodney says, throwing up his hands, defensive.

“Great,” Landry says, in a rush. “The contract will be drawn up and sent to you before the end of the week. The airman will see you out, and someone will escort you to a hotel. Good day, Doctor McKay.”

If Rodney didn’t know any better, he’d swear they were trying to get rid of him. But he is grateful to be out of the room before Carson can get into the nitty gritties of the biological squishy things in the folder, so he bundles up John, both folders, the crayons, and a last cup of coffee, and strides out the door with John dangling by his waist in Rodney’s arm, wide eyed and amused.

The lights go down behind them and Carson stands up to start giving everyone a lecture on DNA and ATA and RNA and a whole alphabet soup of things that means that John is special. Rodney doesn’t need to hear this part. He already knows that.

* * *

Rodney directs the airman and the private car to the most expensive hotel in Colorado Springs, has them booked into a two bed with a Jacuzzi tub on the SGC’s dime. John is cranky and hungry and pissy, and Rodney wheedles him into the tub with promises of onion rings from room service. John is subdued and far more relaxed after the hot bath, and nibbles only cursorarily at the onion rings before moping over to the sofa and slumping down to watch TV.

Rodney tries not to take it personally. He knows that John is scared and overwhelmed and Rodney is the only available outlet for his distress. Still, they were ten dollar onion rings, so Rodney finishes them and goes to have a hot shower himself. When he emerges from the bathroom, skin pink and hair fluffy, it is to find John, too emotionally exhausted to resist any longer, conked out on the sofa in front of the TV.

Rodney dresses in a pair of clean boxers and a teeshirt, and goes over to the desk. He flips open the universe patterned folder and goes through the files.

He skips the biology stuff, and the stuff that’s just a briefing on Rodney’s time at Sheppard Manor. (Crap, he’s going to have to fly back there to pack up his stuff, and John’s stuff even though all his clothing is moth eaten or gone or out of date, and the Atlantean Glass and the McKay-Sheppard Relay and his funny ghost-watching glasses, and the toboggan of course; he’d rather hire a moving company, but all of his stuff is delicate and security sensitive, double crap.)

Rodney gets angry when he finds the personal file on John in the middle of the John’s folder. He pulls out all the forms and statistics and rips them to shreds. He carefully preserves the copies of the pictures of John’s parents standing in front of the manor, the little bundle of baby boy in Mrs. Sheppard’s arms. John has his mother’s eyes and ears, for sure, but the hair is completely his father.

Rodney can’t help running his fingers over their faces, wondering what happened to them. He doesn’t have to guess at what kind of horrific grief they must have felt when John died; he understands, now.

Rodney pulls out the pictures of the interior of the Manor, of Sheppard’s room and toboggan, of the grave before and after the exhumation, of the desiccated corpse that used to house the soul of John Sheppard, but no more. He puts the picture of the Sheppards in his wallet for John, for later, and goes into the bathroom with the rest and very deliberately uses one of the complimentary matchbooks to burn them over the toilet.

He is so angry that he doesn’t even look at the rest of the file, just takes it out of John’s, notes absently that the topmost page is a family tree, and jams it into the back of his own. John can have the rest of it when he’s ready for it. When he’s dealt with what’s happened, when they’re settled and they have a routine and it’s all easier.

Then Rodney goes over to the sofa and wrangles John out of the damp oversized hotel bathrobe and towel, leaving him in tighty whities and a Spiderman tee-shirt, and tucks him into the bed furthest away from the door.

Rodney locks the door, jams a chair under the handle, balances the phone on the seat (he figures it will make the loudest rattle if the chair is knocked aside), then repeats the process with the window: locking, jamming the Gideon Bible into the frame so the window can’t pull back far enough to allow a body entrance, and booby trapping it with a glass from the bathroom.

Rodney feels slightly foolish, but it’s better safe than sorry.

He ruffles John’s hair one last time, and lays down in his own bed. Rodney is alone in it, not curled protectively around John because of his own paranoia or because of John’s nightmares. 

Rodney realizes with a little start that it is the first time since John was born.


	6. Chapter 6

Neither of them sleeps. John fusses all night, screaming a little and kicking a lot and whimpering. Rodney holds out for about an hour, thinking about all that advice he’s learned from movies about babies having to learn to sleep through the night and not running to comfort them at every scream.

Then he thinks, you’re stupid McKay, because while Rodney might be a new father, John is no infant. He’s a boy, already out of his toddler stage, with all his teeth and the ability to tie his own shoelaces. John’s not fussing because of separation anxiety or because he doesn’t feel swaddled enough.

John is dreaming about being dead. John clears his throat a lot, and Rodney knows that he’s dreaming about coughing until he stops breathing. John wraps himself like a burrito in the covers and Rodney knows John is dreaming about freezing to death.

Rodney fears bubble-wrapping John, he’s afraid he’s going to turn John into a wimp or into one of those kids who can’t finish anything because he knows his Dad will step in and solve his problems and yell at his teachers and browbeat his coaches. Rodney’s afraid that John will act out because he’s been overprotected, join a gang, mug people in parks or run them up trees or maybe end up taking drugs or turning tricks.

Rodney fears that the twenty-first century is going to be too overwhelming for John, that he won’t ever get the technological adeptness that kids require to function in schools and jobs, or just to be cool with their peers. Rodney fears that John is going to get bullied for his strange manners and his polite observations. Rodney fears that John will have a nervous breakdown, never reconciling the schism between his early childhood and now.

Most of all, Rodney fears John will never know that somebody loves him.

So Rodney throws back the covers and goes over to John’s bed. He tugs at a peeking corner of the John-burrito, rolls the boy out slowly, pale skinny limbs sprawling, shakes out the covers, and settles himself under them. John rolls into a bitty little ball, clearing his throat over and over in a little desperate hacking grunt.

Rodney schooches close, wraps his arms over John’s shoulders, pulls the kid up so he’s half balled up on Rodney’s shoulder and chest, pokey knees digging into Rodney’s ribs. He rubs his hand down John’s back and John’s hand balls into Rodney’s tee-shirt, and his fist relaxes a little. His hair is sweaty, matted in damp cowlicks against his forehead. Rodney reaches up and brushes the hair back, tucks the comforter closer around their sides.

John sighs, uncurls a little, and mashes his face unhappily against Rodney’s collarbone.

“’M here, John,” Rodney says softly. “It’s all worked out now. It’ll be good. It’ll be good.”

“Mother?” John whimpers.

“It’ll be good,” Rodney says again.

He closes his eyes and sighs himself and hopes that he’s telling the truth.

 

* * *

In the morning, Rodney calls Jeannie.

“They made me sign the confidentiality agreement,” Jeannie says when Rodney starts on the story about Carson and the adoption mistake that O’Neill was supposed to have told her. “You can tell me the truth, now.”

“He’s a clone,” Rodney says, “of a ghost who lived in Sheppard Manor when I bought it.”

There’s a silence from Canada, long and deafening.

“You cloned a ghost,” Jeannie says, and it’s not a question so much as a different way of saying ‘you’re an idiot’.

Rodney glances at John, still sacked out on the bed but spread out like a starfish, relaxed to the point of bonelessness. It’s a relief after last night’s rocky attempt at separate beds.

Rodney picks up the phone and goes into the bathroom and shuts the door as much as the cord allows. He grabs the coffee decanter from the machine and fills it up at the tap. The gurgle of the sink covers the silence from the other side of the phone.

Finally, as Rodney is ripping open the packet of substandard coffee and dumping the grounds into the ridiculously little basket, Jeannie says, “You’re serious, aren’t you? You mean it.”

“I mean it,” Rodney says. “I work for an international organization; intergalactic, really, but that’s not relevant to this story, well, except in that there are aliens.”

“Aliens?!” Jeannie yelps. “For serious?”

Rodney sighs. “Is Kaleb or Madison in the room? They can’t hear this and you’re repeating everything I say.”

“No, no, they’re out,” Jeannie assures. “What kind of aliens? Martians? Little grey men?”

“No life on Mars,” Rodney says absently as he searches for the non-dairy creamer amid the doileys and satchets of faux sweetner. “Not anymore,” he adds. “Little grey men, yeah, they’re called the Asguard. Good guys, even if they have a slightly disturbing aversion to pants and a complete inability to recognize my genius.”

“Oo-kay,” Jeannie says. “And John’s a … an Asguard?”

“What? Oh, no,” Rodney says. The coffee maker gurgles to life and Rodney takes out the decanter and sticks his mug directly under the spout. “No, John’s the descendant of an Ancient, uh, well, that’s what we call them. We dunno what they were called; Asurian, maybe? Lantean?”

“Wait, were? Mer, I don’t understand.”

Rodney replaces the decanter to catch the rest of the coffee, then sits down on the closed toilet seat and slurps. It’s terrible, but caffeine is caffeine. Rodney will have to go find a shop and bring some decent beans back to the hotel. “Well, if you’d stop interrupting me…” Rodney says, and slurps again.

“Yes, fine. So the Lanteans?”

“Well, okay, so there were these people who existed about ten thousand years ago. They were human, sort of, I mean, they looked like us. They probably evolved on Earth, and if they didn’t, then they triggered the evolution of humans here, at any rate. We don’t know a lot, only that they departed for another place for a long time, then came back, leaving behind their great city. Uh, Atlantis.”

Rodney pauses and waits for Jeannie’s exclamation of surprise. There’s a quick silence and Jeannie says, “You told me to stop interrupting. I’m listening.”

“Right, so, Atlantis. Um. Well, anyway, we know that there was a plague or something; they had to abandon Atlantis and the last of them came to Earth to, sort of, you know, live out their days, go native. ”

“And they interbred? Died out?” 

“Yeah, that.”

Jeannie’s voice wavers. “Can you track who these people are? The… ancestors?”

“No,” Rodney says, “it was thousands of years ago. Everyone on Earth probably has a bit of their genetic material. Maybe us. Oh, hum, I wonder if Madison has the ATA?”

“But you said John was…?”

“Right, yes, um, well, see – people who are, um, more direct descendants have something called the Ancient Technology Activation gene, means they can interact physically with the, um, the Ancient Tech. That’s, uh, my job. Studying the tech, figuring out how to make it so us lowly humans can use it, that stuff.” Rodney doesn’t think he’s ever summed up his job so quickly, or so modestly, but he can practically feel Jeannie’s impatience radiating from the other end of the phone. “Anyway, another side effect of the ATA seems to be something called Ascension; that is, instead of just dying, people sort of … transform into beings made up of energy and exist on another plane of reality.”

“Wait, so there are other realities?” Jeannie asks and Rodney can’t help a grin. Jeannie Miller may have given up school to be a stay at home mom, but she was still a McKay, a mathematician, and his sister.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Wait, so John… you said ‘ghost’; he was Ascended?” And that’s why Rodney always liked working on his research with Jeannie – she can follow where he’s going.

“Half,” Rodney says. “He, um, well, he had no training and help, he just sort of got stuck between the planes after he died.”

There’s another long silence, and Rodney hears a bit of a muffled sound that he realizes with a start is a sob. 

“Oh, Jeannie,” he says softly. “Sorry, I… it was… John was… shit.”

“No, it’s okay,” Jeannie says. “I’m stupid. I mean, ‘ghost’, of course he had to have died. I just… Um… how did he? I mean, if he’s my nephew now, I don’t want to… to say the wrong thing…”

“Um, he – got sick. Pneumonia or something. When he was ten.”

“How long ago?”

“Hundred and fifty seven, um, years.”

“Jesus. And he was alone, in, in Sheppard Manor that whole time?”

“John says he was asleep, until I got there.”

“Why you?”

“I was his unfinished business; he, um, our great grandfather made the toboggan his mother gave him for Christmas. He, uh, John died before he could thank uh, Doctor McKay.”

“That... that’s… wild,” Jeannie breathes.

“Yeah,” Rodney says. “So, you know, I bought the place and had a ghost and then, um, Carson, he’s in charge of the ATA research, so he figured it out and uh, we used Asguard technology to clone John from his own, uh, corpse and then… Yeah. Uh, the Asguard don’t procreate they just, keep cloning themselves.”

“That’s intense,” Jeannie admits. “I, uh… wow.”

“You okay?” Rodney asks.

“Yeah, yeah, I just… need to think. Aliens. Clones. Ghosts. Just… Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Rodney says, and puffs out a chuckle. “Yeah, I think maybe he was a Lantean, too."

"Serious?"

"No."

"Jerk."

"Yeah."

"Only... aliens. God. That's... amazing and... awful and.... I knew it."

" I said the same thing when they told me.”

Rodney can hear her eyes narrowing. “When did they recruit you, Mer?”

“Out of my undergrad; they paid for the MA and the two PhDs, and can you stop calling me that in front of John and Madison? I don’t want to be called Uncle Mer.”

“It’s your name, Mer, what’s wrong with your name? There’s a long history of Merediths in our line, it means ‘sea lord’, it’s tradition, Mer,” Jeannie says and it sounds exactly how Dad used to say it, too. “It goes all the way back to--”

“Myriddin of Cardiff, I know, I know,” Rodney says and rolls his eyes; sure she’ll be able to hear that they way h can hear hers. “Oh, hey, Myriddin is the name of an Ancient, he was Merlin.”

Jeannie breathes in hard. “So does that mean we’re part alien? Do we have the ATA gene?”

“I don’t,” Rodney says miserably.

“Sore point?”

“Only a little.”

“Oh… hey, is Area 51 real?”

“They sign my paycheques. I hope it’s real.”

“Oh. Um. Okay, so…”

“So,” Rodney echoes. “Are you really okay?”

“I will be. Mer?”

“Yeah?”

“Take care of yourself, okay? I mean, call me if you need advice, or you just wanna talk, you know, parent to parent?”

“Yeah.”

“And make sure John knows you love him.”

“Yeah.”

“And Mer?”

“What?”

“Just, um… I’m happy we’re talking again.”

Rodney sighs and feels something in his chest unwind a bit. He leans back against the toilet tank and tilts his head up until the back of his neck is against the cool porcelain. 

“Me, too.”

“Love you, Mer.”

“I, um.”

Jeannie chuckles. “Bye, Mer.”

“Bye.”

Rodney sighs heavily and hangs up the phone and sets it down on the countertop. There’s a bit of a creaking sound, and Rodney looks up to find John standing at the door, his knuckles white around the frame.

“I’m an alien?” John asks.

“Uh,” Rodney says. He sets the coffee cup down on the rim of the tub and licks his lips and wonders how to answer that one. And here Rodney thought the sex talk was going to be the tough one.

“That’s…” John starts and then stops, searching for the right words. “That’s kinda cool.” He smiles tentatively, shaky and miserable, but getting there, getting there.

“Yeah,” Rodney agrees. “It kinda is.”

* * *

They move into a suite with a separate bedroom and office as soon as one becomes available in the hotel. There are two beds in the bedroom, and every night Rodney and John start in separate ones. By the middle of they night, they're together. Eventually, Rodney spends less and less time curling up around John, protecting him from his nightmares, as John starts to forget.

Carson comes over their first night in the suite and makes use of the kitchen. Rodney had filled it with Mr. Noodles and cold cereal and some beer for himself and coke for John, gourmet coffee and a dozen donuts, but beyond that he’s pretty hopeless in the cooking department. Well, he’s okay at sandwiches.

Carson uses the hotel pots and pans and shows John how to make chili, slowly browning the ground beef and kidney beans, chopping the celery together, and peeling the carrots. Rodney watches them from the chair in the living room, two dark heads bent together over the galley sink, John standing on a pile of telephone books.

Rodney’s heart squeezes, and he sets down his red pen, closes the folder he’s been flipping through, and goes into the kitchen. He ruffles John’s hair and the boy looks up, grinning so wide that Rodney’s nearly blinded. He plucks two beers out of the fridge, and one diet coke, and drops one beer and the coke onto the counter beside the busily working chefs.

Rodney watches them, leaning against the small fridge, noting how Carson corrects John’s knife technique with a patient word, the way he gives John small jobs that are easy to accomplish, feeding John little goals that he can feel a sense of pride in completing. Carson says, “Yes, John,” and “just like that, John,” and “good job.” Rodney sucks it all in, memorizes it like the universe depends on it.

Rodney takes a pull of the beer, watches John copy his loose stance and the way he tips his head back, and wonders if he’s made the right choice, asking Carson to give this up.

But then John turns to Rodney and says “Rodney, look! I’m cooking! It’s cool.” 

And Rodney bends down and accepts the tomato-saucy hug and the shy cheek to cheek rub, and thinks, No, I’m so glad this is mine.

* * *

Rodney spends October reviewing and revising (read: scribbling insults in red sharpie) the current ZedPM and Ancient research. John spends October in the suite’s living room with a rotating cadre of tutors, making sure he’s got enough basics of English and arithmetic, science and art to get along well enough when it’s time for him to start attending a public school.

Rodney would have preferred home schooling or Montessori at the very least, but finally agrees to Carson’s nagging to send him to public when Carson points very deliberately at Rodney’s chest and says, “Do you want John to have social skills like yours?”

Hallowe’en is a particularly bad night. Rodney blames Cameron Mitchell for bringing over the horror flicks and teaching John about trick-or-treating. At first, John was fine with getting candy from the strangers in the suburb Carson drives the four of them to, dressed up in Mitchell’s aviators and oversized bomber jacket with the sleeves rolled up.

(Rodney wanted John to be Einstein for Hallowe’en, but he had no idea where to get a white frizzy wig; Carson had brought over a small lab coat and stethoscope and a black leather doctor’s bag for collecting candy in; Mitchell had won.)

But when John points to a kid wearing sheet and asks, “What’s he supposed to be?” and Rodney thoughtlessly replies, “A ghost” is when the freak-out starts. John drops his pillow sack of loot and wraps his arms around himself and shivers. He runs over to the little girl in the sheet and whips it off her head and says, “My name is John and I was a ghost too, but it’s okay because Carson can make you alive again!”

The little girl’s mother snatches her child up and starts screaming at Rodney that his son is a psycho and clearly delusional and to stay the hell away from her daughter. Rodney scoops John up, too, settles him on his hip – John is taller than he used to be, less bean-pole, and it’s getting harder to pick him up like this – and screams back at the mother that John’s just a kid and she should chill the fuck out.

Carson murmurs apologies and Mitchell scoops up the dropped candy and they pile back into Carson’s SUV and go back to the hotel.

“I was just tryin’ to help,” John murmurs into the furious silence.

Carson sighs and breaks the tension and says, “We know, John. But it’s supposed to be a secret, remember?”

John nods and plays with the tufty end of a salt water taffy wrapper and says nothing.

They watch the ‘Thriller’ music video and the first ten minutes of ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, John negotiating with Cameron for the taffy, having a mini Kit Kat for the first time, and trying a sip of Carson’s dark Brains Beer, before it all becomes too much and John climbs into Rodney’s lap and buries his face in Rodney’s neck and says, “I hate Hallowe’en!”

Rodney hugs him helplessly as Mitchell and Carson pack up the movies and leave the candy on the coffee table and let themselves out of the hotel room quietly. Rodney tries to explain that it’s all for fun, that Hallowe’en used to be about saying goodbye to the spirits of the dead and that just makes John start to cry.

Rodney panics and calls Jeannie. He doesn’t hear any of the conversation after he hands John over as John’s got the headset tucked between Rodney’s neck and his own ear, but the sniffling eventually subsides and John says, “Uh-huh” and “Yes, Aunt Jeannie,” and finally says, “Thank you,” and “good bye”, and “I will, I promise.”

He hangs up the phone himself, leaning away from Rodney’s body, leaving behind a rapidly cooling damp patch on Rodney’s shoulder. Then he punches Rodney in the arm.

“Ow!” Rodney says.

John looks like he’s trying really hard to flatten the mischievous smile that threatens. “Aunt Jeannie told me to,” he says in his defense.

John has a soothing hot bath, then Rodney jumps in the shower, and in the night that proceeds the both of them get about three minutes total of restful shut eye due to John’s night terrors (and Rodney isn’t too proud to admit, a few nightmares of his own).

November is spent in meetings with the SGC and the teachers at John’s new school and the personnel in the labs. John spends the days with Carson in his lab, getting tested or playing with Ancient toys – room fresheners and holographic photo balls and something that they think is sort of an educational toy that lights up in patterns that John must learn to repeat with the buttons on the sides.

John is allowed to bring the photo ball home, and he curls up into the corner of the sofa and squeezes the sides to show Rodney the picture of the smiling Ancient couple, dressed in the regular cream, a toddler on his hip, a young girl with dark hair and green eyes.

“Maybe she’s my great great great great great, uhm, you know, lots of greats, grandmother,” John says. “I wish she was. Carson said I could have the ball. Can I keep it?”

“I bet she is,” Rodney says, and holds John closer, and they scroll through the family photo album of someone long dead. They give them a made up life and names again.

* * *

Rodney and John move into 27 Milky Way Drive on November 29th. It’s somebody’s idea of a joke, Rodney is sure. The roads in this particular suburb have names like Mercury, Venus, North Star, Vega, and Arcuturus, populated with a more than average amount of SGC personnel, who, like Rodney, probably just moved here for the irony. There’s no Uranus Drive, he notes. The suburb backs onto Skyway Park, mountainous and very good for those long contemplative walks that Rodney has learned John prefers to playing baseball with the other kids in the street or a yard. (Rodney has yet to see one good game of shiny or pickup street hockey; he misses the call of “car!” and “game on!” in the glowing twilight).

Skyview Elementary is adequate, and in the New Year John will be put back in the sixth grade so he can catch up on the basics and make friends. Rodney is horrified, at first, but accepts that John hasn’t picked up a book or a pencil or a… slate since the 1850s. Education has changed a lot since then. John’s homeroom teacher is a former employee of the Mountain, an anthropologist with a specialty in education who decided he preferred tutoring to going off world, and he is very patient with John, knows how hard it is to get used to a new society, a new way of thinking.

John also gets paired with Doctor Heightmeyer, a psychologist from the SGC who specializes in combat counseling and post traumatic stress syndromes.

She gets a copy of John’s file, too, and Rodney asks in the politest terms that he can force between his lips that she not show him the photos of his grave and house until John’s ready to deal with them. Heightmeyer looks insulted that Rodney doesn’t think she has good enough judgment to know when her own patient is ready to deal with the fact that he died. She says as much, and Rodney bites back that it has to be her first time, and Heightmeyer says that Jackson calls her his Back-To-Life Therapist. Rodney backs off.

On John’s one hundred and fifty-eighth, or eleventh, birthday – November 31st - Rodney comes home from the grocery store to find John sitting in front of the fireplace, staring at the flames through the awkward amber-lensed glasses that Rodney had made from the bay window Atlantian Glass of Sheppard Manor more than a year previous.

The box from Sheppard Manor labeled ‘LAB’ is sitting open beside the new sofa.

“John?” Rodney asks, and sets the groceries down on the island that separates the kitchen from the living/dining room.

John looks up and puts the glasses on. He stands and says, “I was just checking. You know, to make sure that there’s no ghosts here. Nobody who needs, you know… help?”

“That’s good,” Rodney says. His throat feels like it’s closing, but he coughs once and says, “That’s thoughtful.”

“Yeah,” John says. “Want help with the groceries?”

Rodney smiles. “If this is just an excuse to get at the Oreos…”

John opens his eyes behind the amber lenses and looks unconvincingly innocent. “No?” he says, and laughs when Rodney lunges at him, fingers curled into claws and a mock snarl rumbling in his grinning mouth.


	7. Chapter 7

Rodney’s never been particularly religious, but there’s something poignant about the day where thousands of people all over the world, millions of people, even, celebrate the birth of a special boy who is destined to die and then come back again.

Its John’s first Christmas since he died.

On December 20th, Rodney and John fly back to Sheppard Manor. Rodney wishes that children were allowed in the cockpit; they haven’t let anyone it to talk to the Captain since the mid nineties, and Rodney vaguely remembers watching the pilots flick switches and turn knobs when he was a child. He’s sure John would adore it.

They land at the airport in Newark, and it’s a zoo. Rodney had cautioned John to pack light – only what he could carry onto the plane – and he’s glad of it as he grabs John’s hand probably more tightly than necessary and hustles him past the swarmed baggage carousel.

Once they nip through security, Rodney fetches up against the Starbucks line and decides that he deserves a big fat Venti Canadiano (espresso and coffee in one cup! Heaven!). He jams his hands into his pockets, searching for spare change, and turns to ask John if he wants a hot chocolate or a juice or something.

John is not there.

Rodney’s heart drops out of the bottom of his stomach.

“John!” Rodney squawks, turning in a circle, and immediately three parents with small children look up at him from where they’ve bent to tie shoe laces or negotiate nap times. They all know that tone, that ‘holy shit, where is my child?!’ voice.

“John!” Rodney calls again and darts out of the line, turning in a frantic circle, searching for that unmistakable bed head. “John!”

Somebody with a kid in a garish orange jumper points towards a cheap souvenir stand, and Rodney pelts in that direction, skidding around a wire revolving shelf jammed with paperbacks that the authors are probably embarrassed to have produced, and finds John crouched on the ground, staring with wide eyes at Lego Kit La Guardia Airport set.

“Jesus!” Rodney says and grabs John hard by the shoulders and hauls him up while simultaneously crouching down so that they’re both eye level. “Don’t!” Rodney snarls, one sharp finger aimed at John’s nose. “Don’t you do that to me again!”

And then before John even has a chance to take a breath or ask what Rodney’s problem is, Rodney grabs him hard and pulls him against his chest and clutches for dear life. Somehow they end up slumped against the book shelf and Rodney is on his ass and John is perched awkwardly on his knee, patting his face, and John really is getting far too big for this sort of thing.

“I’m sorry, Rodney,” John says.

“It’s okay,” Rodney says. “I mean, it’s not okay that you wandered off in a busy airport filled with strangers and pedophiles and terrorists who the hell else knows what? Trust agents or the CIA or something. But I mean its okay because… you’re okay.” Rodney’s pretty sure he’s screwing this up, this being a stern parent thing. He tries again. “It’s just, you have to understand. I know that you’re not a little kid or anything, that you’re eleven years old and you can take care of yourself – I was babysitting other people’s kids at eleven – but, I mean, I’m new to this, okay? So I’m allowed to have the sorts of freakouts that the Dads of newborns get, okay?”

John smiles, soft and goofy. “You just said you’re my Dad.”

Rodney swallows. This isn’t something they’ve discussed yet. The Birth Certificate and all the documentation calls Rodney McKay the legal progenitor of John Sheppard, but both parties undersigned know that it’s not true. John calls Rodney by his name, and Rodney’s already prepared a blustery diatribe for the first parents who questions it; John has every right to call Rodney whatever he’s most comfortable with.

“Um,” Rodney says.

“It’s okay,” John says back, the exact same way the Rodney was just saying it: slightly panicked, partially a lie and partially complete and utter truth.

“Let’s…” Rodney says and looks around. There is a salesperson waiting patiently at the end of the aisle, and several parents in the store hugging their own kids tight, having surges of empathy panic. “Let’s get some hot chocolate.”

John surges up and helps Rodney to his feet.

“Okay,” John says. And this time he means it.

* * *

Heightmeyer has asked John to keep a journal, and John spends the drive to upstate New York and the Manor in sleepy silence, scratching away on the page with a blue biro pen. His strokes are careful and concentrated, as if he is still writing with an inkpot and nib, and Rodney keeps the radio off for the sake of John’s quiet reflection.

Rodney does some reflecting of his own, staring out over the snow-smothered hills and the bare skeleton trees. He wonders what John is writing about, what John thinks about the twenty first century, how John describes Rodney in the journal.

They stop at a Target in the last major town and buy enough soup and sandwich fixings to last a week. Rodney indulges in potatoes and sour cream and some thick cut steaks, and John wheedles his way into yet another sugary cereal that he has somehow become addicted to without Rodney noticing. They buy chips and soda, coffee and tea, milk, eggs, pancake mix and real maple syrup from Quebec, a few frozen pizzas, and some fresh produce half in grudging respect for a growing boy’s nutritional needs and half to keep Carson from chewing off Rodney’s ear about spoiling a perfectly well grown clone.

Rodney decides that they can come back tomorrow for a turkey and what is necessary for fixings.

The ride to the Manor takes another forty minutes or so, and John spends this time tense and perfectly straight in the seat, eyes staring ahead like they could pierce the settling twilight and find the house from here. They haven’t brought John’s toboggan with them, and Rodney isn’t even sure if John will go for the suggestion that they buy a different one, a plastic one that they can leave here and won’t remind John at all of the beautiful sky-blue one that rests in the corner of his bedroom back in Colorado Springs.

Rodney slows deliberately at the bottom of the drive, letting them both sink in the view of the Manor, quiet and closed up, rising above the hill like the turn of the Earth is revealing it just for them.

Rodney parks right in front of the front door and turns off the ignition and blows out a breath.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Ready,” John says. “Dibs.”

“On?”

“The bathroom. I gotta pee.”

Rodney hands over the keys, points out which one opens the front door, and then John is off like a shot. He leaves the rental’s door wide open, freezing cold air blasting in on Rodney’s face, his bare hands, his exposed arms.

Rodney shivers and laughs and calls out, “Hey! Get back here and help me with the groceries, squirt!”

* * *

John spends the next ten minutes walking around the Manor, making sure that everything is right where they left it. The cleaning company that Rodney hired was far more reliable this time, and John’s room has been spit polished. All the doors were left wide open, and the air doesn’t smell as stuffy as Rodney expected; someone probably had windows open earlier in the day.

Rodney turns on the heating as soon as he walks in the door, but the whole house is still frigid. He and John must keep their coats and gloves on. He goes into the library and turns on the fire as high as it will go, and then closes the door to trap in the air when he moves to the kitchen.

Rodney throws one of the frozen pizzas in the oven, debates making a salad and decides he doesn’t want to deal with all that washing and chopping in this cold, and pops open some of the fruit juice. He really wants some coffee, but he’ll never sleep if he succumbs to the craving.

John wanders back into the kitchen when the aroma of melting cheese and sizzling pepperoni wafts through the house, and they take the pizza and some plates and napkins into the library. 

They sit down in front of the fire and stay hunkered there as the room grows warm enough around them to shed their outer layers, coats and hats peeling away. When they’re finished the pizza, John pulls out his journal and starts writing some more and Rodney pulls out a science journal and starts scribbling in the margins, and they pass a happy evening in comfortable silence.

They part ways to go to bed, the house comfortably warm now, and John lingers at the door to Rodney’s room after saying his goodnights. 

John has his own room in Colorado, and Rodney’s only had to go into it in the middle of the night and shake John out of his nightmares once so far. But John’s eyes are tight around the corners, his mouth a grim, downturned line.

“C’n I…?” he asks, words slurred with exhaustion. “Just tonight?”

Rodney holds up the covers of his bed in answer and John dives into it, head first, reckless and overjoyed, the same way he hurls himself at everything else. 

Rodney says, “Goodnight, John,” and turns off the bed side lamp.

* * *

In the morning, Rodney wakes to an empty bed and the smell of coffee sneaking up the stairs. He wonders who showed John how to use the coffee maker, and then decides he doesn’t care. He pulls on some socks and switches into a tee shirt that he hasn’t spent all night sweating in, and goes down to the kitchen.

There is a cereal bowl with a few pink and yellow crumbs and the remnants some vaguely bluish milk in the sink, and John is sitting at the table with a cup of tea. The coffee maker is gurgling happily, and John has one of Rodney’s science journals spread out before him, a deep frown of consternation making him look far older than he was.

“You get it?” Rodney asks, pouring out some coffee for himself and gesturing with it at the journal.

“Sort of?” John answers, and Rodney spends the rest of the afternoon going through the theory step by step by step. It is deeply satisfying, and when they are finished, they’re both grinning, and famished.

Rodney makes scrambled eggs in the microwave and he does not burn them.

In the afternoon they go back into town, stopping at a proper grocery store for turkey (and tofurkey), green beans, bread crumbs, cranberry jelly in a tin (not for Rodney, though, they put lemon zest in that stuff), cocoanut roasted marshmallows, chocolate pie, and more wine than Rodney really feels comfortable with carrying out of the store. It feels kind of silly to have one’s eleven year old son holding the bottle of Baco Noir because Rodney’s run out of hands.

John is a hit pretty much wherever they go. He’s not like most boys his size or age, slouching along defiantly three steps behind their mothers, muttering unintelligible answers, or too absorbed in pacifying hand held game devices that they’re not even paying attention to where they’re walking.

Instead, John sticks close to Rodney, eyes wide and sponging in everything, reading price tags and nutrition labels thoughtfully, vetoing bad gift ideas and answering cashier’s questions honestly and thoroughly.

Two middle aged women and one middle aged man behind cash registers have flicked their eyes over to Rodney after a pleasant conversation with John, assessing him, gaze going up and down and then to his eyes, to his bare left ring finger, to his mouth or, in one memorable instance, his package.

Rodney pinks each time and one of the women calls it cute. She gives Rodney her cell number and John gives Rodney the fisheye as he shoves it into his pants pocket. 

“What?” Rodney asked. “I’m not allowed to date?”

John shrugs. “Am I?”

“God, no,” Rodney says. John raises his chin in a mulish pout that shocks Rodney to the core when Rodney realizes that John has learned this particular gesture from him – it is pure stubborn McKay. “When you’re sixteen, maybe,” Rodney allows, deflated by his own awe.

As they’re walking out of the last of the shops and back to the rental that they’ve parked in a municipal lot, John veers to the side and stops in front of a narrow grey-bricked building. The sign above a big bay window says “Heritage Centre” and an oval maroon plaque on the wall beside the door says “Here dwelt Mayor David Sheppard; 1860-1912.”

John reaches out and runs one gloved finger around the rim of the whole plaque. Then, without saying anything, he pushes open the door and steps inside. Rodney follows, slowly, and the both set their shopping bags down on a chair by the door.

Inside what must have once been a parlor is now a desk with a cheery sixty something woman with bright hazel eyes. John takes his time making his way over to her, stopping to look at every oil painting and photograph what’s hanging on the wall between the entrance and her. She waits patiently, smiling softly and tapping her nails on a pile of pamphlets. Rodney stays by the door; this is John’s journey, and Rodney will only step up if he’s needed.

“Hi,” John says when he finally gets to the desk. “Who’s David Sheppard?”

The woman smiles. “David Sheppard was the Mayor here a long time ago. This used to be his house. He was born here.”

John swallows and balls up then uncurls his fists, then jams them in his pockets and scuffs his toe on the ground. “Who were his parents?”

Rodney swallows hard and shoves his own hands into his pockets and forces himself to lean casually against the wall.

“Margaret Sheppard, nee Jones, and Andrew Sheppard. They moved here from Scotland.”

“I know that,” John says automatically, then stops and wrinkles up his nose.

The woman smiles again. “David was their third child. His older sister Elizabeth was born first.”

John opens his mouth and closes it and shakes his head once. Rodney knows what John wants to ask, but can’t. It’s a hard question, Rodney knows. So Rodney clears his throat and asks for him: “That’s only two.”

The woman looks up and makes an appreciative, indulgent face at Rodney, like she’s so happy he’s taking an interest in his son’s education. “Jonathan Sheppard, their eldest, passed away when he was a child. They moved out of the Manor and into this house, after that. A private buyer got the Manor at auction, though, so we can’t open that up to the public. Did you know, there was a Doctor here last summer, doing genealogical research? He was very interested in Jonathan Sheppard, and it was the first time anyone’s had permission to--”

Rodney waved his hand and jumped in, interrupting before she could get to the sordid parts that Rodney was sure Hieghtmeyer hadn’t gotten John through yet. “Did they have any more kids?”

The woman frowns at the interruption, but takes in John’s hunched shoulders, his red cheeks, and goes along with the topic change. “No, but Elizabeth had four, and David five.”

“Nine,” John says. “That’s a lot of nieces and nephews.”

The woman’s indulgent smile has come back. She hands him a pamphlet and says, “The rest of the house is a museum, if you’re interested. The Sheppard family was very influential in this area; a branch of the family has a stud farm a few miles from here.”

“No, thank you,” John says politely and folds up the pamphlet carefully and puts it in his back pocket. “Maybe another day.”

“What a nice young man!” the woman says, “What nice manners!”

John turns pink and looks at his feet. 

“Done, John?” Rodney says by the door and John nods and walks back to Rodney with his head down. He collects up his bags and turns to say thank you to the woman.

She grins back and says, “You know who you remind me of?”

John stiffens. Rodney tries to tell the woman with the sheer force of his glare alone that her observation is about to be unappreciated. She doesn’t heed and says, “My nephew Patrick’s boy, when he was your age. You have the Sheppard eyes and nose.”

John mutters a thank you and bolts out the door.

Rodney sighs and follows him out. They walk back to the car in silence, and Rodney tenses, waiting for an outburst, or a scream, or tears, or something. Instead, once they’re in the car and buckled up and the shopping is in the trunk, John says, “Nine nieces and nephews is a lot of nieces and nephews.”

“It sure is,” Rodney says. “That woman is a Sheppard.”

“It’s weird.”

“Yup.”

“Can we go back later? Look at the museum?”

Rodney spares a glance at John before turning right out of the parking lot and getting them onto the road out of town. “You sure you want to?”

“Yes,” John says firmly.

“Okay,” Rodney allows. “Later.”

“Later.”

* * *

Carson joins them on the 22nd, and Jeannie, Kaleb and baby Madison arrive a few hours after. Jeannie has brought two crazy carpets and a GT with her. She is quick to head out into the snow after being cooped up in a car, driving down from Canada, and somehow wrangles first Kaleb and then Rodney onto the crazy carpets with her.

John watches from the porch, sitting on a garden bench with Carson and a baby Jeannie so bundled up she looks like a caterpillar in quilted down.

They don’t all stay out for long, just long enough for Jeannie to try to persuade John to take a trip with her on the GT, and for John to decline. Kaleb, Carson, Rodney and Madison go back inside to crack open beers and watch some hockey while Jeannie and John build a snowman that ends up with a snow top hat.

Rodney watches through the bay window, no longer amber but plain old boring glass, as Jeannie tries one more time to get John on a toboggan. John looks reluctant, taking the strings of the crazy carpet like they’re going to bite him, but he sits down at the top of the hill and Jeannie tucks up behind him, legs wrapping safely around his waist, and then they’re gone, over the top and out of Rodney’s sight.

Rodney waits by the window, breath held, shoulders tight. When their heads pop back up over the crest, John is grinning.

Rodney lets out the breath and goes to make dinner.

Jeannie and John toboggan until it gets too dark to see and navigate around the foliage at the bottom of the hill, and come back inside. A vegetarian stir fry is waiting for them, along with a pot of tea, when they get back in. Jeannie feeds Madison in the library, and then they all sit down in the blue dining room to enjoy Carson’s efforts. John proudly points out the place where he stuck a fork in the wall, and by the lack of shock on Kaleb’s part, Rodney realizes that Jeannie has probably told him everything she knows about John’s origins.

“What part of ‘non-disclosure’ don’t you get?” he says, but it comes out as more of a sigh than the annoyed growl that he intended.

Jeannie shrugs. “Just because we don’t keep secrets from each other doesn’t mean we’re incapable of it.”

Madison gets fussy at the end of the meal and John takes her into library to read her a story. Jeannie and Kaleb take the opportunity to sneak off to the guestroom, ignoring Rodney’s shout of (“Ew! Not in my house!”)

Carson says he’ll watch John and Madison, and vanishes into the library with a laptop, leaving Rodney alone to do the dishes. Once everything is jammed into the washer and the machine is cranked into chugging life, Rodney sneaks away to his own room and pulls a flat rectangular cardboard box out of the back of his closet.

For Christmas, Rodney has gotten the photo of John and his parents digitally enlarged, enhanced, and framed. It has a hazel mat, the same colour as John’s eyes, the same colour Rodney imagines Mrs. Sheppard’s were. Rodney touches their faces, skims the side of his finger along Mrs. Sheppard’s jaw, Mr. Sheppard’s ear. 

“I’ll take good care of him,” he tells them as he folds the gaudy red and gold paper like blindfolds over the faces. “I promise.”


	8. Chapter 8

All children, except one, grow up.

 

His name is Peter. 

Another boy, named John, almost didn’t grow up either, but then two mad scientists invented a way for him to come back to life, so eventually John Sheppard celebrates his twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth birthdays, and all in too close a succession, according to one of the mad scientists who is now his father.

John lives in Colorado, so he learns to downhill ski, then snowboard, then skateboard. He loves NASCAR and can’t wait until he’s sixteen so he can drive cars himself. He wants a motorcycle; Rodney wants John to have a motorcycle like he wants a Gou’aould burrowing into the back of his neck.

John has already been up in planes with more SGC personnel than someone with a pilot’s license. Frankly, if John Sheppard can find a way throw himself headlong into the air and go faster than two hundred miles per hour while doing it, he is a happy kid.

John and Rodney hang the sky blue toboggan over their mantle place. Sometimes, when Carson or Maddy come over, they take it out to the pimple of a hill that backs their property and do a few runs on it.

John tries to join the high school football team and is too scrawny, so contents himself with watching it from the bleachers instead. He points out to a cranky Rodney which players are the sons of which SGC Marines and scientists, making sure that Rodney has a thermos of coffee waiting in the car on Friday nights after John’s weeky afternoon of getting poked in the infirmary, so Rodney won’t bitch in the stands.

John gets acne, a few bad haircuts, almost grows into his ears, and gets beat up a few times in the schoolyard for his quiet, careful demeanor. The bullying only lasts until John flattens his tormentors in one, swift, fluid Jaffa take down, and he is never bugged again. Rodney gets called into the office the next afternoon, the other boys’ parents demanding that John gets suspended or Rodney gets shouted at.

Rodney says, “Listen, you retards: your kids attacked mine. He put them on their asses without breaking any noses or teeth. Which he easily could have done. It’s called self defense. Teach your kids that bullying is stupid, and stop wasting my time. Good bye.” And walks out of the office. 

He’s never called in over John’s behavior ever again.

John spends the evenings hunched over models of planes, or schematics of planes, or books about planes, or reading up for his pilot’s license testing.

John is pretty bent on joining the Air Force, despite Rodney’s protests, so Rodney gives him extra home work every night, turns John into a prodigy at maths, introducing it first as games and then as personal family challenges. In their latest game, one or the other of them will purposefully scrawl an equation incorrectly onto the surface of the fridge door in white board marker. If the other can’t find the mistake by dinner time, he has to do the dishes.

No son of Rodney McKay is going to languish with the grunts; if John Sheppard McKay wants to be an Air Force officer, he is going to rise in the ranks, dammit, and he is going to earn every promotion he gets, not just because his father is the terror of the labs.

Slowly, John discovers boobs, and girls, and kissing at parties. John dates a little. Rodney dates a little. Rodney seriously contemplates turning gay, just to see if he’s less hopeless at men as he is at women. John doesn’t seem to care either way. Neither of them is terribly successful at the whole interpersonal relationship thing, so they get a cat and name him Tardis.

And then Carson is asked to go away. 

Pretty much everyone with any proficiency with Ancient Technology is relocated to the base in Antarctica – Zelenka, Simpson, Jackson, Weir, Call, Grodin, the whole shebang. 

It’s a painful farewell; John has never lived outside of biking distance to Carson’s flat, and there’s an understandably special bond between the three of them.

Then they ask Rodney, too, and he takes the written request home and lays it all out on the kitchen table and he and John go through it very carefully. Rodney sees no fault in the job offer or the contract, except for the part where John can’t come.

There’s a politely worded suggestion in a letter at the end that maybe it was time for John to move out of the shadow of the SGC and go live with Aunt Jeannie for a few years. At least until he’s old enough to enlist. By then, they’ll have probably found Atlantis, and John can get a transfer onto the expedition with Rodney. 

There’s never been any question that John Sheppard McKay was going to go to Atlantis. Rodney is only slightly annoyed that no one’s actually asked Rodney and John if Rodney thinks it’s safe enough for John to go (he doesn’t, but then maybe John will have military training by then, so he’s not sure), or if John has any desire to. 

Low ranked jarheads and guards get killed depressingly often in the SGC and Rodney doesn’t want John to be one of them.

When they finish going over the papers, John says, “What will we do with Tardis?”

Rodney blinks at him and wonders when the little boy sitting forlornly on the sky blue toboggan became so mature and responsible. “You think you’re going too, then?”

John shrugs. “I’m way smarter than everyone else in my class. I can do the university math now.” Rodney knows. Yesterday, during John’s volunteer lab hours, he corrected Kavanaugh’s simulation correlations. Kavanaugh was pissed. Rodney was elated.

Rodney calls Carson and gets John a spot as a junior researcher with the genetics division. The rest of his subjects can be made up while in Antarctica, and a rotation of tutoring is set up, John bouncing from one department lab to another at McMurdo.

The junior researcher position is not quite as ‘hard math’ as John would prefer, but it gives him a chance to spend a lot of time in the Control Chair with electrodes strapped to his head, which, oh, he just freakin’ loves. And the Chair loves him back and it’s almost disconcerting and slightly too sexual, though Rodney can’t pinpoint why.

They take what passes for a suite at McMurdo Base, easting vegetables way past their prime and re-watching the same few movies over and over. John laments only a little that there’s no one there his age, until the Marines teach him how to play billiards in the common lounge.

Turns out John is something of a pool shark, all that math and those angles and the physics of force scrolling behind his eyes as he lines up his shots.

The hours John doesn’t spend in the pool hall he splits between keeping up with his studies (“Yes, John, even the ancient mythology text books. C’mon, I know I’d usually say you don’t need it, but, hello, Gould?”) and harassing the mechanics in the chopper bays to let him help with repairs.

And then, one day, Carson is really excited, for reasons that Rodney can’t fathom. He’s pulled Rodney out of the room where he was trying to implore General O’Neill to let them use the ZedPM to get to Atlantis, and dragging him towards the Control Chair.

For a brief second, Rodney panics, thinks something has gone awfully wrong, something blew up or sucked down and John’s been hurt. Carson sees the worry smeared all over his face and clucks, “Ya dunna think we’d be running if there was a problem?”

Rodney grins ruefully and relaxes. Carson goes back to babbling excitedly. He says ‘lineage’ and ‘tracked the family tree’ and ‘remarkable natural expression’ and ‘physical resemblance is incredible.’ Rodney tunes him out, busy scanning the bustling room for the tell tale tuft of bed head that is his son’s ridiculously emo haircut.

“We were lucky, Rodney,” Carson says. “He was almost tossed out of the Air Force, so the SGC snapped him up.”

“Tossed out?” Rodney asks, coming back around to the conversation when Carson says something of interest. “Wait, what? What good is a soldier who gets chucked out?”

“Have you even been paying attention? No, forget I asked. For going against the insane orders of a hard-assed CO who gave the wrong order anyway and got half this guy’s squad killed? He got court marshaled for going back for them, and woulda been out on his ear with a dishonorable discharge.”

Rodney considers. He wouldn’t mind having someone in Atlantis who would turn around and come back for him, if things went south. “How did you know he’s what the SGC needs, though?”

Carson smiles, that same fucking cat-and-canary smile that Rodney has come to associate with medical experiments gone wild.

“John,” Carson says, but he doesn’t say it to Rodney’s face. He’s calling it over Rodney’s shoulder.

Rodney turns to look, and he sees his son, all gangly limbs and thin back, hunched over the control chair with someone in a shiny olive SGC flight suit.

“John?” Rodney squawks. Two identical messy black heads turn around to look at him, revealing twin pairs of hazel eyes, slightly crooked noses, big white grins.

“Rodney, hi!” John says and beckons Rodney to come over with such enthusiastic gestures that he nearly whacks the guy beside him in the nose. “This is John Sheppard, too. Isn’t that cool?”

Rodney really, really needs to sit down for a second. Except that the only seating option nearby is the Control Chair, so Rodney opts for clinging to a nearby wire shelf instead.

“I… what?” Rodney says. And that, of course, is when everything that Carson’s been talking about, ‘finding other ATA people’ and ‘lineage’ and ‘got Jackson’s team to do some genealogical digging’; this John Sheppard is related to Rodney’s.

“We figured it out,” Sheppard says, wrapping an arm around his counterpart’s neck, giving him, of all things, a noogie. And strange John Sheppard McKay, with his bizarre Victorian mannerisms, even after five years, allows it. “Major Johnathan Patrick Sheppard. He’s my um, great-great--”

“Great,” John adds, with a massive grin.

“Grand uncle,” Major Sheppard finishes triumphantly.

“Jesus,” Rodney whispers.

“I go by ‘John’, usually,” Major Sheppard corrects with a smirk, “But I guess we’re going to have to figure out who gets to be called what.” He sticks out his free hand to shake and Rodney’s fingers are so numb he barely feels the other man’s palm and hand around his. “Pleased to meetcha.”

And then John laughs and points to a hologram hovering above the Control Chair, a perfect, glorious rendition of the Sol solar system in glittering blue.

“Hey, look. I did that!” John says, and grins.


End file.
